Dark Star Safari

22. The Trans-Karoo Express to Cape Town

After even a short spell in the warped fourth dimension of Mozambican ruin and reconstruction it seemed odd to be back so soon in the bustle of urban South Africa. I was disconcerted by the sight of smooth streets and stoplights, even of mature roadside trees, and undefiled parks, and of such a novelty as a stylish babe in a new convertible, gabbing on a mobile phone in Rosebank, a diamond-dealer perhaps or someone cornering the market in tanzanites. It was even stranger to hear the Johannesburgers’ constant grumbling, black and white obliquities about their lack of prosperity, their sagging economy, how the buying power of their money had halved in just a few years.

The frequent South African remark ‘This is a First World country with a Third World mentality’ could easily have been applied to so many countries in the world that I had seen, I did not take it seriously. The statement brought to mind not just Northern Ireland but some of the more picturesque and sullen parts of the United States and Europe — irreconcilable, like parts of South Africa.

For me, South Africa was a place where almost everything worked, even the political system. The whole huge place was accessible by train and bus. One of the consequences of the decades of white government paranoia was the ambitious road-building program, for military purposes, to keep order. This road network meant that the army could go anywhere; and now civilians could do the same. The universities were excellent, the level of public debate was impressive, and the newspapers were embattled, following crime stories and impartially assessing government policy and political scandals which, in South Africa, were sometimes steamily related. Even the education system was praised for its high-mindedness.

So it seemed a bad sign when a front-page headline the day after I arrived was ‘GORDIMER “TOO RACIST” FOR SCHOOLS’ — Nadine’s novel July’s People had been stricken from the reading list by the Book Selection Committee in the Gauteng Province Education Department. Because this province included Johannesburg and Pretoria, it contained South Africa’s largest concentration of classrooms, in which this plausible doomsday novel had been required reading. The book was labeled ‘deeply racist, superior and patronizing,’ and ‘an anachronism because it projects a South African future that has not happened,’ and ‘not acceptable as it does not encourage good grammatical practice.’

The silly remarks were an excuse for me to reread July’s People, which I did with pleasure. One morning I wrote an article for the Johannesburg Sunday Independent, jeering at the ignorance and philistinism of the Book Selection Committee and having a bit of fun with Nadine’s chief persecutor, a commissar who rejoiced in the name Elvis Padayachee. I mentioned how the imaginative brilliance of Gordimer’s work was its utter fidelity to the truth — how we behave, how we speak, how our cities look, how our marriages work, how we love, how we die. And how, if someone writes truthfully, their work always seems prophetic. Given the uncertainties and changes in South Africa, the cataclysmic events in July’s People were still possible. Thirty years before, in A Guest of Honour, she had described the crisis that was being played out by rivals and land reformers and racists in Zimbabwe today.

Nadine said, ‘This sort of banning reminds me of the days of the apartheid regime, when they suppressed books they didn’t like. I had thought we had moved on from that.’

She said the suppression was a bad sign; she didn’t take it personally. But censorship in South Africa had never been simple. In the days of paranoid white rule, not only had my Jungle Lovers and The Mosquito Coast been banned, but for their seemingly racial and inflammatory titles so had The Return of the Native and Black Beauty On the other hand, The Mosquito Coast was now a required book in South African high schools and my defense ofJuly’s People was prominently published. I could not think of another newspaper in Africa that would have published such a piece as mine, because I dealt with a government directive by mocking it for its stupidity.

‘I am much more worried about Reinie,’ Nadine said, of her ailing husband. ‘He’s very weak. He is my concern at the moment.’

Knowing in advance that it was the last leg of my trip, and perhaps the best train, I dithered over boarding the train to Cape Town. I wanted to savor the anticipation of going, but I also procrastinated because after this my safari would be at an end. I lay on my hotel bed in Johannesburg replaying my journey through the good people I had met, seeing the proud Nuba, Ramadan, driving me across the gritty wadis of the Sudanese desert; Tadelle and Wolde in box-creased newly bought clothes at our sad parting on the border at Ethiopian Moyale; Wahome, the writer and former prisoner in Nairobi; Apolo, the unlikely prime minister, teasing me in Uganda; the hospitable captain, and squiffy-eyed Alex on Lake Victoria who was at this moment in the engine room of the Umoja, tinkering with the old diesel; Julius on the bush train from Mwanza; Conor and Kelli on the Kilimanjaro Express; Una Brownly, the self-effacing nurse from Livingstonia Mission; my student Sam Mpechetula in Zomba; Karsten Nyachicadza, expert paddler, in Marka Village on the Shire River, smiling at life in general through a haze of blue smoke; the farmer Peter Drummond outside Norton, shrugging at the appearance of yet more invaders; all the African prisoners, and the long-distance bus drivers, and the market women — cheerful people, doing their jobs, against the odds. I was grateful to them for making my trip pleasant. I missed them. I wished them well.

At Park Station one morning waiting in line to buy a train ticket I struck up a conversation with the young African woman in front of me and told her where I was going.

She said, ‘I heard the other day on the radio there is a really posh train running to Cape Town. It’s expensive in our money, but in your money it’s probably cheap. Ach, have a safe trip!’

Another kindly person, helping me on my way.

It wasn’t the well-known Blue Train, and it wasn’t First Class; it was Premier Class, a new designation, on the Trans-Karoo Express. I bought a ticket, and made a reservation. The fare of $140 included all meals and a private compartment. At the Park Station newsagent I bought two blank notebooks. I was expecting to have plenty of time for making a fair copy of my long story. It was a twenty-seven-hour trip, 850 miles from Johannesburg to Cape Town, across the high desert known as the Great Karoo, something like the distance from Boston to Chicago.

I left the next day. Waiting with the other passengers on the platform for the train to arrive I noticed the different postures of anticipation — the whites habitually stood, looking watchful, facing inwards in little family groups, surrounding their luggage; the blacks lounged on the benches in pairs, looking relaxed, their legs extended; the rest, the mixed race people, the uitlanders, foreigners, Indians, seemed to keep moving, circulating warily among the others.

Because of security, steel fences divided the platform, and only travelers Could get past this barrier.

‘Not like this in Australia,’ said a stocky white man, heaving his bag Bob, traveling with his wife, Sylvia, both of them about fifty and rueful. And years ago you could see your family off. It was friendly. None of this security. None of these fences.’

‘Different in Australia,’ Sylvia said.

They were Johannesburgers born and bred but within eight months would be emigrating to Brisbane and planned never again to return to South Africa. ‘It’s just too horrible, what’s happened here,’ Bob said, in that complex South African way of saying ‘here’, yeueah. He was a factory worker, hoping to find employment in Australia, though would he? His trade was the fabrication of railway ties — cement and wooden ‘sleepers.’ Not much call for those in Oz.

An African approached me, singling me out of a large group of waiting travelers, and said, ‘Mr Theroux?’

No one ever mispronounced my name in South Africa, because Leroux was a common name and the place was full of the descendants of French Huguenots.

‘How did you know it was me?’

‘I’m the steward. After a while on this job you get to know people by sight. I can usually fit a name to a face.’

That was Craig. He escorted me to my compartment, and explained the features — hot shower next door, bar in the next coach, reading area and lounge. Pinky, a Zulu woman in a smart uniform, would take my drink order. Lunch would be served in an hour in the dining car.

The train whistle blew two sour notes, and with a yank on the couplings that sounded like an anvil clang, we pulled out of the station and headed west. I sat in perfect contentment and watched the city pass the windows. The long shadows of big buildings were replaced by the brighter suburbs, the garages, the fast food outlets, the supermarkets, the squat fenced-in bungalows, and the one-man businesses that characterized small settlements, Mohammed’s Meat Market, Solly’s New and Used Hardware, Dave’s Deals for Wheels, Prinsloo’s Panelbeating. If there were no people in sight I would have taken these lifeless and antiquated Edwardian terraces and arcades to be Australian, for they showed the same turn-of-the-century colonial architecture, bungalows of hot stucco, with gingerbread trimming, and tin roofs, even the same hardy shrubbery, bright-eyed lantana bushes and peeling, droopy eucalyptus trees. Farther out, the small industries, meat packers, rubber tire warehouses, cement, scrap metal, soap: they actually made things here.

Sixty or so miles out of Johannesburg we passed an enormous graveyard at Tshiawelo, Avalon Cemetery. Two heroes of the struggle were buried here, Joe Slovo and Helen Joseph. But all I saw were muddy slopes and fields, without either trees or grass, just crude graves. Each grave was surrounded by an iron cage, like a baby’s crib made of rusty uprights and steel mesh, to keep the digging animals out, dogs, hyenas, ferrets, whatever. In different parts of the graveyard, funerals were in progress, people praying, or standing near newly dug holes, in the posture of mourners, no one standing straight, everyone somewhat crook-legged and bowed in crippled attitudes of grief.

At Roodepoort a little later, in the dining car, George the waiter was serving me pan-fried Cape salmon fillets, while a whole platform of waiting, luggage-carrying Africans burdened with bales, baskets, crates and blanket rolls, looked in at me — or were they looking at the African family of four at the table behind me, being served by the jolly white waiter?

The towns here were small and orderly, most of them built in the shadow of mine workings, rows of houses on the main street, a school, a church, a rugby field, low hills and fields beyond, Mayberry in the goldfields, among mine dumps that looked like hills. Some of these towns looked as though they had been built to last. The station at Krugersdorp, with corbels and finials and severe Cape Dutch ornaments, had been built in 1899, the date carved high on its cupola. At the edge of town there were simple solid uncomfortable looking miners’ huts and miners’ hostels, also a century old and still inhabited, and partly hidden by billboards saying Please Condomise and Thank You for Condomising.

In even the whitest town on the veldt there was a reminder of less fortunate Africa — a ragged man walking up a path, an old man on a bike, a woman balancing a bulging bale on her head, an amazing bird on a post, African huts, barefoot kids, tin privies, squalor, cornfields. And the place I took to be an armed camp — high chain-link fence, razor wire, guard dogs, spotlights on poles — turned out to be the perimeter of a country club, the area that looked like a training ground for recruits, just a golf course.

We came to Potchefstroom. I remembered the name from a story a Venda man named William had told me in Johannesburg. He had grown up in Pietersburg in what had been the Northern Transvaal and had gone to a black school there.

‘It was just a country school,’ he said. ‘I was very young and didn’t know anything. But one day we took the train to Potchefstroom to play another school at football. After the game we were so hungry! We walked to a restaurant. We saw white people inside, but they wouldn’t let us in. They said, “Go to the window.” Beside the restaurant was the window where we were served.’

I told him that this arrangement was common in the American South up to the 1960s.

William said, ‘Here it was take-away for black people and sit-down for white people. We didn’t get angry. That was the situation. We got used to it, but that was my first experience of “Go to the window.” I never sat in a restaurant. Even now — true — I don’t know how to use a restaurant. You need money, yes, but you also have to know what to do when you get inside. I don’t feel comfortable.’

The signs Slebs blankes, Whites Only, persisted into the late 1980s. I asked William whether he had children.

He said he did, two girls, sixteen and thirteen. ‘My kids know how to use restaurants. They have no idea of what life was like before. I haven’t told them yet. I will tell them when they are twenty-one. But they won’t believe me. They think it’s nothing to go into a cinema or a restaurant or a hotel. When I was young we had no idea. We were afraid. Or white areas — we didn’t go. We didn’t hate whites. We were frightened of them. They were so hard.’

I asked him to give me an example of this fear.

He said, ‘About 1981, I was still a teenager, working for Mr Longman. I went to Durban with him, for a job. When we got there they wouldn’t let me into the hotel. He was a carpenter, on a job there. I was his assistant. He said to the hotel people, “I will pay for his room.” But they said no. They wouldn’t let me in. So I slept in the car. After a few days, Mr Longman found me a place to stay at the church. You think my kids would believe that?’

The name Potchefstroom had jogged my memory of his story.

Klerksdorp was the first big station on the line. An English-sounding man in the corridor said to me, ‘This is Terreblanche territory’ — meaning that it was fiercely white still; not just verkramp, unbending, but far-right neo-fascist. Eugene Terreblanche, a bearded demagogue in his late fifties, was the white separatist leader of the AWB, Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging (Afrikaner Resistance Movement), a rump of unrepentantly racist Boers that were based in Ventersdorp. He was now in prison serving a sentence for assaulting (and paralyzing) one black man and for the attempted murder of another. Depending on who you asked, Terreblanche was either the Afrikaner Moses or a hard-drinking womanizer and embezzler.

The fact that on the south side of the tracks there were salubrious houses did not mean the whole of Klerksdorp was prosperous, for on the north side of the tracks there was a shanty town of tin shacks — box-like huts made of old tin sheets, windowless walls and flat roofs, a squatter settlement as slummy as anything I had seen in Tanzania.

Markwassie with its crude sign, 173 miles to Johannesburg, had the look of 1930s Mississippi in the evocative Depression photos: ragged blacks, hot sun-baked fields of pale cookie-dough furrows, grease-stained train yards, rusty tin-roofed warehouses, a curving shine of parallel switching tracks. Markwassie was a railway junction, where skinny black children screeched and waved at the Trans-Karoo Express.

Nothing of Africa here — this looked like hot, sad old America until, about ten miles farther up the line, I saw eland cropping grass at a game ranch. In the distance there were big purple and pink clouds, intimations of sunset in the still air and the uncertain chirps of birds at the day’s end on the high plains of the Middelveld.

I used the hours of darkness to turn from the window and scratch away at my erotic story, copying and revising, and reminding myself that, however secret or forbidden, such images vitalized us and fueled the imagination. In his book on Hokusai, Edmond de Goncourt wrote, ‘Every Japanese painter has a body of erotic works.’ All the greatest Japanese print makers had indulged themselves in the erotic and had devised a nice euphemism for such works, calling them shunga, ‘spring pictures’.

In Johannesburg I had bought Guillaume Apollinaire’s Les Onze Mille Verges, which was plainly porn, not to my taste, Gothic and absurd by turns, most of it too athletic or too painful to be likely. Apollinaire, who had invented the word surrealism, had written about the Japanese prints I had in mind. I read his book quickly and at one point describing the motion of a train he alluded to the Alphonse Allais couplet,

The titillating motion of trains

Sends desire coursing all through our veins.

The dinner gong rang. I sat at a table with a shaven-headed motorcyclist named Chris and an older English couple who seemed tetchy but perhaps were just nervous. They kept their names to themselves. But they did say that they had lived in southern Africa since 1960 and, ‘We could never live in England now.’ They were taking a holiday in the Cape wine lands. The man said he was a train buff. ‘My dream is to take the Trans-Siberian. But I have health problems.’

In spite of his shaven head and missing teeth and bike-madness, Chris had a zen-like view of the world and he discouraged any belittling of the state of the world, Africa included. ‘Yaaaw, never mind.’ Chris said he was half-English and half-Afrikaans. ‘So, yaaaw, I’ve got problems, too.’

‘You go on all these big holiday rides with all the bikers, I suppose,’ the Englishman said, as though chipping flint with his teeth.

‘Oh, yaaaw. Very nice. Like flying,’ Chris said mildly.

‘Quite a few members of the swastika brigade on those rides,’ the Englishman said.

‘Oh, yaaaw. You get everyone,’ Chris said. ‘Women. English. African, too.’

I said, ‘I rode a bike for a while, but I stopped. I figured I would end up an organ donor.’

‘Oh, yaaaw. I’ve got me some good organs to give away. But I smoke, so — Ha! Ha! — not lungs.’

Meanwhile we ate the four-course meal of soup, fish, Karoo lamb, and mousse for dessert. I did not volunteer anything of my travels, and was fearful of mentioning trains to a train buff, but instead asked the Englishman how he happened to choose a life in Africa.

‘I was eighteen, just out of school. I joined the Colonial Service and told my mother I would be away three years. She was so angry. She said, “You’ll never come home!” ’ The Englishman smiled. ‘And I didn’t.’

He had worked in Northern Rhodesia until it became Zambia; then in Southern Rhodesia, until the struggle for Zimbabwe became violent, and finally had come to South Africa. To ask the question that hung in the air — was he staying? — was indelicate, even impertinent.

Anyway, he changed the subject. He said, ‘This is in fact the boat train. People sailed from Europe to the Cape and took it up to Jo’burg. And they went home that way, too.’

I guessed that he was tormenting himself with thoughts of emigrating to Australia.

That night, late, we came to a station in the bleak Karoo. I hopped out of the train to look upwards at the starry sky, the brilliance of luminous pinpricks, more stars than there was darkness around them. I saw a shooting star.

‘Sometimes you can even see the Mulky Why,’ said a disembodied voice on the platform.

In the morning, we passed the stations of Prince Albert Road and Laingsburg, where the Great Karoo descends to the Little Karoo. The Karoo is plateau land and high desert, and rolling through it on this pleasant train I had a creeping recollection of entering Patagonia, seeing the same sorts of simple farm houses and bushes blown sideways and flocks of sheep squinting into the wind, everything except Welsh settlers and gauchos. Even in the middle of nowhere, in grazing land of low bush, with a horizon of low blue mountains, the settlers were houseproud.

The land was mostly prairie, some of it just scrub, and here and there a grove of trees, each one like a farmer’s implanted flag, and at the end of a long cart track a classic white house with a Dutch façade and a white gate.

A rap on my door: the steward. He said, ‘We are coming to Touwsrivier and De Doorns, sir. Please make sure your windows are closed and locked. We’ve had thefts before. People coming through the windows.’

He was right about Touwsrivier, a distressed-looking community of poor houses and ragged yellowish Africans, in the Witteberg of the Little Karoo. The people were Khoisan, ‘coloured,’ the marginalized people of the provinces. The fields were full of ostriches, some of them roosting on the ground, others prancing next to the train. And then some men on the platform came to my window and pressed their faces against the glass and pointed to a dish of chocolates wrapped in foil on a little shelf, each man’s gestures indicating I want one.

De Dooms was partly a slum in a mountain valley, some of it looking very desperate — metal box huts made of roughly cut corrugated sheets; and poor scrap-wood houses. On the other side of the railway line, the white side, a bigger church, better houses. From the vexed oriental look of the men frowsting by the tracks I took them to be Khoisan, their faces feline. Some of them hoisted wooden impedimenta at the train windows, which were boxes of overripe grapes. Beyond the town were vineyards, so I took these squatter camps to be the settlements of grape pickers and winery workers.

At one time, only male workers had been allowed within these town limits. Workers’ hostels and workers’ huts were the tradition, a male society of lonely and hardworked drunken men. As part of his pay, on Fridays each vineyard worker got two liters of wine, a drip-feed system of alcohol that had turned most of them into winos. Perhaps this explained the squatter camps, most of which had sprung up after Mandela came to power, and which were composed of whole families. In the past, the women had been left in the villages, as Nadine had described in a sad but perceptive paragraph of July’s People:

Across the seasons was laid the diurnal one of being without a man; it overlaid sowing and harvesting, rainy summers and dry winters, and at different times, although at roughly the same intervals for all, changed for each the short season when her man came home. For that season, although she worked and lived among the others as usual, the woman was not within the same stage of the cycle maintained for all by imperatives that outdid the authority of nature. The sun rises, the moon sets; the money must come, the man must go.

At the prosperous town of Worcester — beautiful villas and trim houses, a tall steepled church, football fields, tennis courts, schools, lawns, flower gardens — big pleading black men begged at the windows of First Class, gesturing to their mouths and pointing to their stomachs, saying, ‘Hungry, hungry’ and asking for money.

I bumped into the English couple in the lounge. Without my asking, the man volunteered that he was not planning to emigrate.

‘We’re not going anywhere,’ he said. ‘We’re retired.’

They lived in a suburb about fifteen miles north of Johannesburg. Of course, there was crime there, the man said; there was crime everywhere. He gave me an example.

‘I was coming home a few years ago and stopped in my driveway. I got out of my car to open the gate and was surrounded by three chaps. They had guns. They were shouting at me — they wanted my car. My wife heard the noise. She thought I was talking to the neighbors. She came out with our two dogs.’

‘So you were safe?’ I said.

‘Not a bit. The dogs were useless. They thought we were going for a ride. They wagged their tails. My wife was pistol-whipped and I was hit hard. We both needed stitches. We lost the car. But, you see, that could have happened anywhere.’

‘Anywhere in South Africa.’

‘Quite.’

They got off at Wellington, to head for Paarl and the wineries. Wellington was another lovely place with a huge hut settlement joined to it — acres, miles perhaps of flat-topped shanties, becoming simpler, cruder, poorer, more appalling the farther they were from town. The squatter camps seemed a weird disfigurement but I made a note to myself to visit one when I got a chance.

For hours there had been mountains to the south of the railway line, great rocky peaks, but at Belleville I got a glimpse of a single bright plateau ahead, standing in the sunshine, and I knew we were at the city limits of Cape Town.

The cold gusting wind, and the frothing sea, and the sunny dazzle on Table Mountain’s vertiginous bulk looming behind it, made Cape Town seem the brightest and least corrupt city I had ever seen in my life. That was its appearance, not its reality The high wind was unusual for the Africa I had traveled through but not for this coast, my first glimpse of the Atlantic. The wind was usually blowing twenty knots, and often gusting to forty, enough to tear the smaller limbs from trees and send them scraping along the pavement. The huge mountain and its precipitous cliffs made the city seem small and tame, and unlike Johannesburg which had a city center of dubious-looking people whose stare said I can fox you, Cape Town was provincial-seeming and orderly, the train station looked safe. I wanted to be near the sea, so I took a taxi and found a good hotel on the waterfront.

After making the usual inquiries, and receiving the usual cautions, I went for a walk along the waterfront and sauntered into the town and through the museums. Nearby were the Company Gardens, dating from 1652 when Jan van Riebeeck, on behalf of the Dutch East India Company, had planted them with the idea of provisioning Dutch ships. On their arrival at the Cape, the Dutch had found various groups of people, Khoisan among them, scouring the beach for shells and edible seaweed. They called them ‘beachrangers’ and ‘Hottentots.’

Yet some of the natives they met spoke broken English — ones who had been in contact with the English, who had come ashore years earlier. From the first, these ‘beachrangers’ were put to work, as van Riebeeck wrote in a memo, ‘washing, scouring, fetching fuel, and doing odd jobs. Some of them have even placed their little daughters, who are now dressed after our fashion, in the service of our married people.’

That had been the reason for Cape Town’s existence: it had been founded as a port for supplying cattle, vegetables and water to the ships of the Dutch fleet headed for Batavia and the Indies. After ten years at the Cape, van Riebeeck himself went to the East Indies, where he died. The interior of Africa, unknown land, had held no interest for the Dutch or anyone else. The hinterland had been named ‘Kaffraria’, a translation of ‘Quefreia’, on a sixteenth-century Spanish map. The Spaniards had gotten this word for infidels (‘people who live without any religious laws or sanctions’) from the Muslims who had occupied Spain. The word appears on all early maps. For example, on an eighteenth-century French map that I bought while living in Kampala, I find among the descriptions of the natives, ‘Peuples cruels’ and ‘Anthropophages’ and ‘Sauvages’ and ‘Hotentots.’ The word ‘CAFRERIE,’ printed big, covers a large blank area from the Tropic of Capricorn to the Equator. In 1936, van Riebeeck’s biographer naively explained, ‘Today, the term kaffir, with its invidious connotation utterly forgotten, is attached solely to the Bantu, and as a matter of fact it was never colloquially applied to the Hottentots.’

When the Huguenots arrived with their enological improvements and enlarged the vineyards, life was just about perfect and it remained so, for the whites anyway — winebibbers and wog-bashers — for over 150 years. The Dutch were content to remain in this Mediterranean climate of the Western Cape until the early nineteenth-century, when the British took charge of the Cape Colony. Under pressure from the missionaries, the British abolished slavery, and promoted the idea of racial equality. Feeling crowded by the British, and insulted in their belief in white supremacy, and robbed of their workforce of serfs and slaves, the Boers decided to abandon their fertile farms. In 1838, in what is known as the Great Trek the Boers headed north into the interior, across the Orange River and the Vaal to dispossess and enslave local blacks, and create their own white states. Among the ostrich skin wallets and zebra skin cushions in the curio shops of Cape Town, were supple leather sjamboks. It was impossible to see these whips and not think of them as the very symbol of South African history

What impressed me in Cape Town was its smallness, its sea glow, its fresh air; and every human face was different, everyone’s story was original, no one really agreed on anything, except that Cape Town, for all its heightened contradiction, was the best place to live in South Africa. No sooner had I decided the place was harmonious and tranquil than I discovered the crime statistics — car hijackings, rapes, murders, and farm invasions ending in the disemboweling of the farmers. Some of the most distressed and dangerous squatter settlements of my entire trip I saw in South Africa, and without a doubt among the handsomest districts I had ever seen in my life — Constantia comes to mind, with its mansions and gardens — I also saw in this republic of miseries and splendors.

Not long after I arrived I called Conor and Kelli, fellow travelers, whom I had last seen on the faltering Kilimanjaro Express. I used a telephone number they had given me. I was curious to know what had happened to them after I had gotten off the train at Mbeya.

‘Paul, it was incredible. Come over and we’ll tell you all about it,’ Kelli said. They were both in town, staying at the house of Kelli’s mother, somewhere up the side of Table Mountain.

The house on the slopes of Devil’s Peak was so buffeted by the powerful westerly that parked cars trembled on their tires, and window panes distorted reflections like fun house mirrors because the glass was pressed and sucked by the gusts. House doors flew open and slammed, plastic bags shot through the air and snagged and whipped on tree branches, trash barrels spun from the sidewalks and banged and clattered down the street.

‘Look who’s here,’ Conor said. He was clean-shaven and tidier than he had been on the train but otherwise his exuberant Irish self. ‘Oh, God, after we left you in Mbeya the whole trip went downhill.’

The Norwegian woman got sick at Kapiri Mposhi and needed to be hospitalized. They were stranded there for a few days. And then the bus that Conor and Kelli took south from Lusaka kept breaking down.

‘By breaking down, I mean we hit a donkey and he flew through the windscreen and died in the driver’s lap, and some Boers on the bus said, “Aye, let’s have a braai and grill the bastard and eat ’im” — can you imagine?’

In Conor’s Dublin brogue this was a marvelous manic lilting sentence.

Instead of barbecuing the dead donkey they pressed on to Chinhoyi, where they got stranded again. ‘No one had Zim dollars, so we were really up a tree. We gave up in Harare and just flew home to Cape Town, bugger the buses. How about you?’

I summarized my progress from southern Tanzania but my conclusion was bugger the buses, too. I said I preferred the trains, especially the Trans-Karoo Express.

‘We were on the Karoo two weeks ago for a weekend,’ Conor said, getting up from his chair so that he could fling his illustrating arms around in precise Irish gestures. ‘A little hotel run by a gay couple. We reckoned on a little hiking in the hills, good food and a bit of rest. Jaysus, it turned out to be a nightmare, from the moment we arrived — Kelli, her mum, and me. I said, “Let’s watch the football in the bar.” It was one of those strange Afrikaner bars, a lot of drunken farmers on a Saturday afternoon. The barman was weird, too — he had been a soldier in Angola and was half-mental because of it. Some blacks in the corner, looking unwelcome. Anyway, I switches on the telly and a big drunken farmer lurches over and looks me in eye.’

Imitating the lurching farmer Conor goggled into my eye.

‘Football’s a kaffir sport. Either watch the fucking rugby or turn it off! No fucking kaffir sports in this bar!’

‘We’d only been there five minutes, see. Anyway, he went on yelling at us because I wouldn’t turn the telly off. Then the farmer said, “Look, he’s a kaffir!” — and he hugged one of the blacks in the corner who looked horribly embarrassed — “though he’s my friend, my kaffir friend.” He goes on, “But these bloody people are making us suffer. Nine hundred and fifty farmers have been murdered since ’94!”As he said it, Kelli — who’s pretty impatient, as you know — put her hand over her mouth and pretended to yawn.

‘The Boer went ballistic! He made a lunge for Kelli, and I tried to grab him.

‘Then the barman — well, the barman must have done some pretty strange things in Angola, because he was really mental, I mean, he showed us his paintings later. You should have seen them, like some Vietnam vet with post-traumatic stress. They were really upsetting. The barman starts saying, “Nie vrou! Nie vrou! She’s a woman, you can’t hit a woman!”

‘But the crazed Afrikaner was trying to hit Kelli with a pool cue and I was trying to drag him down, and me mother-in-law is screaming and the telly is too loud.

‘The mental barman went ballistic too, just as one of the gay guys comes in and says, “What is the matter?” And that was the awful part, because the Boer was bellowing in Afrikaans, “Shit! Fuck! Kaffirs!” and missed Kelli and hit the gay guy in the face with the pool cue.

‘The gay guy began to cry. The barman vaulted over the bar and hauled him off and went boof! — right in the Boer’s chest, and down he went. As he settled on the floor we ran upstairs.’

‘That’s an amazing story,’ I said, laughing, because Conor had acted it out in the center of the parlor, with the wind snarling and pressing at the windows.

‘It wasn’t over!’ he said. ‘When we were in our room we heard him climbing the stairs.’

Conor imitated a Frankenstein-like stumping up the stairs and along the corridor of the inn, and the Boer’s growling, ‘I’ll kill ya! I’ll kill ya!’

‘I locked the door, but just to be sure I took a chair. I thought: I’ll break it over his head. I heard him start to bellow, “I know where you are!” and still he was banging all over the place. But he didn’t find us.

‘That was the first forty-five minutes of our weekend on the Karoo. I’ll tell you the rest some other time. Have a beer. Cheers. Some people are coming. I forgot to tell you this is our going-away party. We’re leaving tomorrow.’

The guests arrived for the party, multi-hued, a cross section of Cape Town. We drank and they told more stories. I felt I had fallen among friends. I felt close to Conor and Kelli, who knew the tortuous route through East and Central Africa. But they saw no future for themselves here. They were going back to San Francisco, where they had green cards and jobs.

For a few days in Cape Town I did what tourists do. I took a day trip to the wine lands of Franschoek and Paarl and Stellenbosch; looked at the vineyards and the cellars; went to wine tastings. I spent a morning at Constantia and an afternoon on the eastern slopes of Table Mountain, at the national botanical garden, Kirstenbosch, a lush repository of South African plants, filled with succulents and cycads and palms, as well as the fragrant varieties of low bush called fynbos, that was peculiar to the purple moorlands of the Cape. A boundary hedge, planted by Jan van Riebeeck in 1660, was still flourishing at the margin of Kirstenbosch.

One day intending to take the train to Simonstown I went to the station but got there too late for that. However, I was on time for another train, to Khayelitsha. I was in the mood for any train. Unable to find Khayelitsha on my map, I went to the information counter and inquired as to its whereabouts. The clerk, a young affable man of mixed race, showed me the place on the map.

Then he leaned across the counter and smiled and said, ‘Don’t go there.’

‘Why not?’

‘It’s too dangerous,’ he said. ‘Don’t go.’

‘I’m just taking the train. How is that dangerous?’

‘The train was stoned yesterday,’ he said.

‘How do you know it will be stoned today?’

He had a beautiful smile. He knew he was dealing with an ignorant alien. He said, ‘The train is stoned every day.’

‘Who does it? Young kids?’

He said, ‘Young, old, lots of people. From the town. They’re not playing. They’re angry. And they do a lot of damage. How do I know? Because yesterday I was on the train to Khayelitsha. With my friend — he’s the driver. We were in the driver’s cab. When the stones came he was hit in the side of the face. He was all bloody. Listen, he’s in the hospital. He’s in rough shape. He was just doing his job.’

This convinced me. I decided not to go to Khayelitsha and told him so. The clerk’s name was Andy. We talked a while longer. Khayelitsha in Xhosa meant ‘Our New Home,’ and there were 700,000 people there, most of them living in shacks, on the Cape Flats.

While we talked, another clerk sat rocking back in a chair, a big middle-aged African woman in a thick red sweater and a wool hat, with her feet propped against the counter, just out of earshot. She was staring straight ahead and fiddling absently with a scrap of paper.

‘I’m not a racist,’ Andy said. ‘But the blacks in this country think they are being passed over for jobs. In places like Khayelitsha they have no jobs — no money. They thought that after apartheid they would get jobs. When it didn’t happen they began to get wild.’

‘I wanted to see a squatter camp.’

‘No,’ Andy said, smiling, shaking his head at the madness of it, and reminding me of all the times I had heard, There are bad people there. ‘Don’t go to a squatter camp. Don’t go to a black township. You’ll get robbed, or worse.’

The next day I went to a squatter camp. It was called New Rest, 1200 shacks that had been accumulating for a decade on the sandy infertile soil of Cape Flats beside the highway that led to the airport. The 8500 inhabitants lived mainly in squalor. It was dire but not unspeakable. There was no running water, there were no lights, nor any trees; there was only the cold wind. I never got to Cape Town International Airport, but I could just imagine travelers arriving and heading up the highway and looking at this grotesque settlement from the taxi window and saying to the driver, ‘Do people actually live there?’

New Rest was adjacent to an equally squalid but older settlement, called Guguletu, a place of old low beat-up brick houses. Guguletu had achieved prominence in 1993 when a 26-year-old Californian, Amy Biehl, was killed here. She had been a Stanford graduate, living in South Africa as a volunteer in voter registration for the following year’s free election, and had driven three African friends home to the township as a favor. Seeing her white face, a mob of African boys (‘dozens’) screamed in eagerness, for this was a black township and she was white prey. Her car was showered with stones and stopped, she was dragged from it. Her black women friends pleaded with the mob to spare her. ‘She’s a comrade!’ Amy herself appealed to her assailants. She was harried viciously, beaten to the ground, her head smashed with a brick, and she was stabbed in the heart — killed like an animal.

A small cross at the roadside in Guguletu by a gas station marked the spot where she was murdered. It is a main road, there must have been many people around who could have helped her. But no one did. A crude sign board behind the cross was daubed Amy Bihl’s Last Home Section 3 Gugs — misspelled and so crude as to be insulting.

Defying death threats, some women in Guguletu who had witnessed the crime came forward and named Amy’s killers. Four young men were convicted of the murder and sentenced to 18 years in prison. But three years after their imprisonment these murderers appeared before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. They had an explanation. ‘Their motive was political and not racial.’ They were members of the Pan-Africanist Congress, they said, and were only carrying out the program of the party, which regarded all whites as ‘settlers.’

Their argument was ridiculous. How this murder could have been regarded as non-racial made no sense. Mandela was out of prison, elections were scheduled, the country had been all but turned over to the African majority. The mob was of course racially motivated, for they had singled her out. Still, the murderers ‘regretted’ what they had done; they claimed they had ‘remorse.’ They pleaded to be released under the terms of general amnesty. Everything they said seemed to me lame and without merit.

The murderers’ freedom would have been impossible without the assent of Amy’s parents, Peter and Linda Biehl, who attended those sessions of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Though the mother of one of the killers was so disgusted and ashamed by her son’s description of what he had done to Amy that she could not face him, the Biehls embraced the killers. They said that their daughter would have wanted this show of mercy, as she was ‘on the side of the people who killed her.’ The Biehls would not stand in the way of an amnesty.

So the murderers waltzed away. Astonishingly, two of them, Ntom-beko Peni and Easy Nofomela, were given jobs by the Biehls. They still worked in salaried positions for the Amy Biehl Foundation, a charity started by Amy’s forgiving parents, in their daughter’s memory. This foundation received almost $2 million from USAID in 1997, for being ‘dedicated to empowering people who are oppressed.’

The details of this arrangement baffled me. As a father, the thought of losing my children this way was horrifying — I would rather die myself. What would I do in the same tragic circumstances? Well, I would want the murderers off the street; and if somehow they gained their freedom I doubt that I would give them a job. It would enrage me to hear them whining and making excuses. I would expect deeds from them. It would pain me to have to look into their faces. Amy’s parents did not share my feelings.

Later, I asked a South African journalist what she thought of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. She said, ‘If it was not for the concept of forgiveness, which was a steering force of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, I wonder where we would have been? Sometimes incredible things happened, an army general responsible for a bombing met a man blinded by the explosion and shook hands. A torturer was forced to relive his actions. Sometimes killers asked parents for forgiveness and were accepted or rejected. Many people felt the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was a sham, but I thought the process was remarkable when it worked.’

The extreme and unusual forgiveness shown by Amy Biehl’s parents is often remarked upon — so often, provoking debate, that it almost seems that the incredible mercy they showed was provocative to a salutary degree. But much of what was said by the murderers and their supporters was just cant and empty words, for though no one in South Africa seems to remember it, at the time of the amnesty the Biehls challenged them by saying, ‘Are you in South Africa prepared to do your part?’

Guguletu’s grimness was its history as a workers’ area — men’s hostels and men’s huts. Male workers in South Africa had always been easier to control if they were away from their families. For one thing, they could always be sent back to their village. The mines were notorious for the hostels that were regulated like prison blocks. The squatter colony of New Rest that grew up beside Guguletu after 1991 was composed mainly of women who wanted to be near their husbands and boyfriends. Because it had been just plopped down on forty acres of sand there were no utilities, and as a consequence it stank and looked terrible. The huts were sheds made of ill-fitting boards, scrap lumber, bits of tin, plastic sheeting. The gaps between the boards were blasted by the gritty wind.

‘I get sand and dust in my bed,’ said Thando, the man who showed me around.

But, unexpectedly — to me, at any rate — there was an upbeat spirit in the place, a vitality and even a sense of purpose among the squatters. No lights had been put in but there were shops that sold candles for a few cents and other goods were listed in scrawls on cardboard: Oil, Teabag, Sugar, Salt — the basics.

I had not gone to New Rest alone. I had been put in touch with a white couple who took interested foreigners there as a way of putting them in touch with life at the margins of Cape Town. The visitors, startled by the squalor, inevitably made contributions to a common fund. A créche for the children of working mothers had been started with this money — probably the only clean and well-painted building in the place, where two kindly African women looked after thirty-five well-behaved children from the camp.

Most of the shacks were owned by women and more than half the women were employed somewhere in Cape Town, as domestics or cleaners or clerks. The shops in the camp were run by women, and so were the little bars — known as ‘shebeens’ throughout South Africa, an Irish word (originally meaning ‘bad ale’) that had percolated into the language from soldiers’ slang. I went into several of these shebeens and saw drunken boys and men sitting hunched because of the low ceiling. They were nursing bottles of Castle Lager, and smoking-and playing pool and pawing ineffectually at fat little prostitutes.

Life could get no grimmer than this, I thought — the urban shanty town, without foliage, too sandy to grow anything but scrawny geraniums and stubbly cactus; people having to draw water into plastic buckets from standpipes, and using candles in their huts; cold in winter, sweltering in summer, very dirty, lying athwart a main highway; what was worse? Rural poverty at least had the virtue of gardens and animals and the traditional house of reliable mud and thatch. Rural poverty had its pieties, too, as well as customs and courtesies.

Thando took me to meet the committee. This too was funded by contributions from the visitors. The committee was of course all men. But they were optimists.

‘There are no drugs or gangs here,’ one man said. ‘This is a peaceful place. This is our home.’

The squatters were mostly people from the eastern Cape, the old so-called homelands of the Transkei and the Ciskei, as well as the slums of East London, Port Elizabeth and Grahamstown, industrial cities which were not faring well in the new economy.

The committee had aims. One was for roads to be made throughout the squatter colony; another was for piped water.

‘We want to build houses here,’ a committee member explained to me.

The scheme had been outlined and blueprinted by some volunteer urban planners at the University of Cape Town. Every shack had been numbered and its plot recorded. A census had been taken.

‘In situ upgrade,’ the committee spokesman said, rolling out the plan on the table in the committee room.

The idea of transforming a squatter camp into a viable subdivision by upgrading existing dwellings had been accomplished in Brazil and India but not so far in South Africa. This meant that in place of each miserable shack there would be a small house or hut. The driving force for this was the pride the people took in having found a safe place to live. The goodwill of foreign visitors also helped: they had contributed money for the crèche, for three brick-making machines, and for the establishment of a trust fund. The fund was administered on a pro bono basis by an otherwise outward-bound travel company, Wilderness Cape Safaris, which had put New Rest on its itinerary. Some children were sponsored by visitors who sent money regularly for their clothes and education. It was a strange hand-to-mouth arrangement, but the element of self-help in it made me a well-wisher.

I asked what had been here before the squatter camp and got an interesting answer. It had been low bush with the specific function of concealing initiates (mkweta) in circumcision ceremonies (ukoluka) performed by the local Xhosa people. The deed was done with the slice of a spear (mkonto) on boys — men, really — aged from seventeen to twenty-five. No one could explain why circumcision was left so late, but all agreed that it was a necessary rite of passage, essential for male bonding.

‘Even these days they use it,’ one of the committee members said. ‘In June and December, we see them — sometimes many of them, hiding in the bush at the far side.’

Though it was not bush, but only scrub land that lay next to the highway and bordered large scruffy settlements, the area must have had some significance as a refuge in earlier times. Here the newly circumcised young men were rusticated for six weeks of healing, wearing only rough blankets, cooking over smoky fires, their faces painted in the white clay that designated them as initiates of the old ceremony. They remained in the background. In the foreground was Guguletu and this camp. New Rest, the squatter camp, was filled with people so grateful, all they wished for was to make their shacks more permanent, so they could stay there for the rest of their lives.

This being South Africa, and specifically the Western Cape, there was hardly any distance between this squatter camp /circumcision refuge and another kind of refuge. Twenty miles up the highway in Paarl, on the slope of Paarl Mountain itself and its fluted monument to the Afrikaans language, among gentle hills draped in vineyards, was a magnificent country house hotel, the Grande Roche Luxury Estate Hotel. This was an eighteenth-century manor restored to its former glory and now receiving guests. I went there for lunch. The slave quarters had been gutted and redecorated into guest suites. Weddings were held in such a lovely chapel you would hardly have known that this buffed-up and beautified place had been the slave chapel.

A pool, a spa, a walled herb garden, a library, and a gourmet restaurant: the Grande Roche had everything. In Bosman’s, the hotel restaurant, which had achieved Relais Gourmand status, I had lunch — the Caesar salad with slices of Karoo lamb and the herb dressing, my entrée a red stumpnose — something like snapper — served on polenta, with baby vegetables and several glasses of Grande Roche’s own sauvignon blanc. Dessert was marinated strawberries and clotted cream.

Then I sat in the sunshine on a deck chair among the blossoms of the Grande Roche rose garden, drank coffee, nibbled chocolate bonbons from a china saucer, and looked south where rising smoke darkened the sky. There, under that smutty sky, on the Cape Flats was the squatter settlement — grateful people in shacks — where I had spent the morning.

Above me, offering shade, was a lovely tree in blossom with thick pendulous orange flowers.

A svelte white woman passed by me, with the pert, uplifted profile of someone breathing deeply, perhaps inhaling the aroma from the herbaceous border of the path. She wore a blue silken dress and a stylish large-brimmed white hat. Her lovely shoes crunched on the gravel. She smiled at me. I said hello. We talked a little.

‘What kind of tree is that?’ I asked.

‘That’s a coral tree,’ she said. ‘A kaffir boom, actually — you must not say that name these days, though.’

My destination on this African safari had been Cape Town. But, as is often the case with a long trip, I arrived at this destination only to gain a vantagepoint and see another destination, farther ahead, tempting me onward. So I dawdled and procrastinated in this sunny windswept city, and the coziness of a clean hotel, and the greater novelty in South Africa of the only province in which Mandela’s African National Congress was not in the majority. The provincial government was in the hands of the Democratic Alliance, a squabbling coalition of right-wing and conservative parties, Cape Town’s way of asserting that it was unlike any other place in South Africa. Happily for me, people spoke their mind, a reaction perhaps to so many years of whispering.

Some of these locals were so vivid as to seem caricatures. ‘Swanie’ Swanepoel was one of those. A big pale fleshy-faced Boer with angry blue eyes, a jaw like a back-hoe, thick farmer’s hands and tight suspenders stretched across his huge gut and bursting shirt, hooked to his slipping trousers. Everything about him, his voice, his eyes, even his jowls and the way he crooked his fat fingers emphasized his sense of grievance. He had hated the way the system had changed, and his refrain was, Where is the world now?

He was from Upington, an agricultural town in the Northern Cape, on the upper reaches of the Orange River, a twelve-hour drive from Cape Town.

“ ‘You don’t know what it’s like to be poor,” people tell me. Yes, I do! I was poor! We had nothing,’ he told me in his second-hand shop in Cape Town. ‘My mother ran a boarding house. She took in poor blacks and gave them food. For that we were known as kaffir boeties. But the world didn’t know anything of that. The world demanded that we hand over our country. They had sanctions against us. So we had to do it. And so what happened ten years ago was a disaster. And where is the world now? You know they’ve been killing farmers?’

‘I heard about a thousand white farmers have been killed in ten years,’ I said.

He howled at me, ‘Twice that number! The world doesn’t care. I say to Jews, “This is our holocaust! This is our genocide!” They say, “You deserve it.” You have seen this?’

He opened Volksmoord/Genocide, a book of photographs, grisly dismemberments, decapitations and maimings, the text by Haltingh Fourie, in Afrikaans and English. Not much text was needed to know that what was being depicted were the murders of white farmers by African vigilantes in the hinterland. The crime-scene photographs were so horrific I had to turn away.

‘This is happening on our farms right now,’ Swanie said. ‘They think they can drive me out, but I am not going anywhere. Not to Australia, thank you very much. My people have been here for three hundred years! No one cares.’

‘I’m listening to you, aren’t I?’ I said.

‘No one is writing about this,’ Swanie said.

‘What do you want people to write about?’

‘The genocide,’ he said, and tapped the picture of a disemboweled and headless farmer in Volksmoord. He gave a rueful laugh. ‘I know Mandela. I wanted to complain. He said, “Call my secretary.” So I did. The secretary says, “Who are you?” I tell her who I am, Swanepoel, such and such. She says, “Where were you for twenty-seven years when we were in prison?” I says, “Lady, what prison were you in?” She says, “What?” I says, “Don’t what me!” She says, “You Boers,” and hangs up.’

‘How do you know Mandela?’ I asked.

‘Because he was around,’ Swanie said. ‘He wasn’t in prison for twenty-seven years. He was on Robben Island for nineteen and then he had a very easy time of it in Victor Verster over in Drakenstein’ — I had seen it myself on the way back from Franschoek, a rural prison now renamed in the heart of the wine country. ‘Mandela was living in the warder’s house, like a bloody summer camp. And he lied to me.’

Since there was no way I could verify how well Swanie knew Nelson Mandela I changed the subject. But he was so aggrieved, there was no subject for which he did not have a ready-made rant.

‘We’re blamed for everything,’ Swanie said. ‘You know about that march in Cape Town in ninety-two?’

I said I knew nothing of it.

‘They were marching and chanting, “One Boer! One bullet!” Mandela didn’t stop them! And that woman Jabavu! You know her?’

I said I didn’t. But he was in full cry, so what I said hardly mattered.

‘An Indian woman, she wrote a book saying, “If a black was in line waiting to be served in a shop, and a white person entered, the black had to stand aside.” She was talking about District Six, and maybe there was some truth in it. But who owned the shops? Indians! The Jabavus! The Jews! The Muslims! The Boers never owned shops. We were farmers. We were in the Karoo — in the country, on the farms.’

Swanie was now so angry that he threw down Volksmoord and began to close his shop, slamming the burglar bars, hoisting the metal screen, setting the padlocks in their hasps.

‘I fought in the war — how many of these other bloody people fought in the war?’ he howled. ‘It’s the same as always, like when we were invited to sit at Dingaan’s kraal. “Leave your weapons — we won’t hurt you.” The Boers thought the Zulus were being honest, so they went along. That’s what this is now. It is Dingaan’s kraal. The Boers went along and they were slaughtered!’

Like many another South African his sense of history was immediate and aggrieved. To illustrate betrayal he had plucked an episode from 1838. Dingaan was Shaka the Zulu’s son and successor. And what Swanie did not say was that the Boers in revenge for that bit of trickery massacred 3000 Zulus in the Battle of Blood River — the river so named because its waters frothed incarnadine with Zulu blood.

The District Six that Swanepoel mentioned had been polyglot, multiracial, colorful, a cultural hothouse that was a cross between Catfish Row and the French Quarter. It had occupied about forty acres at the edge of Cape Town center, not far from Swanie’s shop. I met many people who had lived there, who regretted its passing. District Six had represented what the whole of South Africa could become without racial barriers. The big happy community had produced writing and music that was so full of vitality and a spirit of freedom that the white government was worried.

A former resident of District Six named Hassan explained to me, ‘One day in 1962 we all got a letter from the government. “This is now designated as a white area.” But there were many whites there. We all lived together happily. Malays, Indians, blacks, coloreds.’

‘So what happened?’

‘We were relocated to the Cape Flats, and District Six was bulldozed,’ Hassan said. ‘All the houses were destroyed. They left the churches and the mosques. You can see them.’

But redesignating District Six as white was such a controversial decision that the land was not built upon, the white houses that were planned never went up.

‘We had to live in an awful place near Muizenberg — Mitchell’s Plain. Hot, dusty, windy,’ Hassan said, in his local snarl — hoat, darsty, weendy. ‘There had been prisoners there in the war. Eye-talians. We got those prisoners’ barracks. We hated it.’

Forty years later, Hassan still lived in Mitchell’s Plain, and District Six was still unpopulated. What remained was the District Six Museum, where I learned that, such was the stupidity of the apartheid government and the irrationality of their Group Areas Act, the harmonious multiracial community of District Six had been separated and dispersed. The District Sixers were sent to monochromatic communities, the coloreds like Hassan to Mitchell’s Plain, the Indians to another outer suburb, Athlone, the blacks to Langa and Guguletu and Khayelitsha. By the mid-1970s most of the residents had been relocated and District Six was renamed Zonnebloem, ‘Sun Flower,’ though the name didn’t stick.

On the floor of the District Six museum was a plan of the streets and the individual houses, with snapshots attached and scribbled over by former residents who offered details and memories in notes and testimonials, many of them heartfelt. I was shown around the museum by Noor Ebrahim, a writer who had grown up in District Six. His grandfather had come to South Africa from Bombay in the late nineteenth century with his four wives and the money to start a ginger beer business. His father had also been in the business. Noor said they were Gujaratis.

‘I’m curious. Did you speak Gujarati at home?’

‘No. We spoke Kitchen English.’

‘Not Kitchen Dutch?’

‘It was Dutch — sort of. But we called it Kombuis Engels. Everyone spoke it in District Six.’ Noor gave me a few examples, all of them Dutch. ‘We spoke proper English at school.’

This word kombuis for kitchen was interesting for being archaic and obsolete. I was told by a South African linguist that the word would have been laughed at in Holland, for it referred to a ship’s kitchen — a galley, in fact. The Dutch word for kitchen was keuken. Every now and then, this man said, a Dutch person would be startled by something in Afrikaans, like the busload of theologians who were told that the bus was slowing down on the highway so that they could pull off. The expression ‘pull off,’ aftrek in Afrikaans, meant masturbate in Dutch.

Of the paraphernalia in the District Six Museum the saddest were the sign boards and warnings of an earlier era, plainly worded cautions: For Use by White Persons (Vir Gebruik deur blankes) and drinking fountains and entry ways labeled Non White (Nie Blank) or Whites Only (Slegs Blanks). The earlier era was not so long ago, for the signs had been displayed as recently as the late 1980s. But such signs, familiar and ubiquitous in the American South, had persisted in the 1960s — White and Colored over side-by-side drinking fountains, for example. Any American who could look upon South African bigotry feeling anything but shame was a hypocrite.

One hot Sunday morning, with reluctance, hating to signify the end of my safari, I set out on the last leg of my trip. It was a day of blue sky and brisk winds. I bought a ticket on the train to Simonstown. Though I had varied my journey with chicken buses and cattle trucks and overcrowded minivans and matatus, it was possible to travel by rail between Simonstown and Nairobi. Cecil Rhodes’s plan had been to extend this line to Cairo. But he had always been something of a dreamer. Another Rhodes wish was for Great Britain to take back the United States, so that we would be ruled by the monarchy, the Union Jack flapping over Washington.

First Class and Third Class were clearly marked on the train, yet we all sat in First, in spite of our tickets, black, white and all the other racial variations that characterized Cape Town’s people. The conductor was nowhere in sight; no one punched our tickets. We sat, no one speaking, on this sunny morning.

We stopped at every station — Rosebank, Newlands, Kenilworth, Plumstead, Heathfield — but in spite of the pretty names some looked prosperous and some poor, with bungalows surrounded by shaven lawns, or squatters’ shacks blowing with plastic litter, graffiti everywhere. Some of these places were the addresses listed in the Adult Entertainment ads of that day’s Cape Times. I knew who lived here ‘Amy Kinky to the Extreme,’ and ‘Nikki and Candy for Your Threesome’ and ‘Abigail — On My Own’ and ‘Candice — Come Bend My Fender,’ and the anonymous but just as promising ‘Bored Sexy Housewife.’

Dead silence in the swaying train, people reading the papers, children kicking the seats, the great yawning torpor of a hot Sunday morning. We stopped in the glare of roofless platforms and then carried on. Soon we were at the shore, passing the wind-driven waves at False Bay and Muizenberg, a very stiff southeasterly with wicked chop driving the greasy lengths of black kelp, so thick you’d take it for a chopped up ship’s hawser. It was strewn in such profusion that it obstructed surfers from paddling out to the breaks.

Just after Fishhoek I saw a strange thing. Out the window about sixty feet from shore, sticking straight out of the sea was a great flapping whale’s tail. It was so near, a swimmer could easily have slapped it. The tail was upright and symmetrical, like a big black rubber thing swaying above the water.

A whale standing on its head? I looked around. The adults were dozing and the children seemed to take it as a normal occurrence, a whale’s headstand in shallow water, an enormous creature’s vertical tail glistening in the sunlight, and remaining upright for so long it was still there after the train passed.

‘They do that all the time,’ a man in the next car said, when I noticed that he had seen the whale, and I asked him about it. ‘That was a Southern Right Whale. It’s known as “sailing.” No one knows why they do it.’

At Simonstown, the end of the line, I walked out of the small white station into the high road. This could have been the high road of any English coastal town, with greengrocers and chemist shops and lime-washed bombproof-looking brick houses named ‘Belmont’ and ‘Belvedere’ and ‘The Pines.’ The arcades and shop terraces were dated 1901 and 1910, and even the coast itself looked English — Cornish to be exact, rocky and wind-flattened, as though Penzance might be just down the road.

The naval station was the reason for Simonstown’s existence, so it was not odd to find fish and chip shops, and pubs advertising ‘Traditional Roast Beef and Yorkshire Pud.’ Captain Cook and Charles Darwin and Scott of the Antarctic and Rudyard Kipling and Mark Twain and many others who had rounded the Cape had stopped in this beautiful harbor. The funny old self-conscious timewarp, with cottages and villas and little chalets on the bluff above the road, even the bus shelters and the telephone kiosks, mimicked those in the blustery harbor villages of the kingdom by the sea.

I walked to Boulders Beach to see the colony of jackass penguins. Unperturbed by the nearness of bungalows and spectators, they were nesting on eggs, frolicking in the surf, and wobbling up the strand like perplexed nuns.

On the coast road at one of the Simonstown bus shelters I waited for a bus to Cape National Park. All the difficulty was behind me. I was just sitting on a bench, waiting to board a bus for the short ride to Cape Point, the end of my trip. A man sitting on a bench opposite was smoking a cigarette and reading a copy of that day’s Johannesburg Star. Some words caught my eye. Flagged on the front top of the paper was the teasingheadline, ‘PESSIMISTIC GLOBETROTTER WINS NOBEL PRIZE.’

‘Looks like I’ve got the big one,’ I murmured, and leaned closer, to give this stranger some news that would amaze him.

But he hadn’t heard me speak, nor did he hear me sigh. The feeling came and went, like the overhead drone of one of those search and rescue planes that misses the castaway adrift in a rubber dinghy: just the briefest flutter of hope. But no one actually loses, because there is only one winner in the Swedish Lottery.

The man engrossed in the newspaper was fleeing his home in England, so he told me. I found it hard to concentrate after the vision I had just had. His name was Trevor. We sat together on the bus and he related his sad story. Trevor had been a crewman on a merchant vessel carrying ammo during the Falklands War. The ship had come under fire, days of shelling.

‘The net result was the skipper lost it — went round the bend — wouldn’t leave his cabin, had to be dragged on shore, was invalided out. But that wasn’t the worst, was it?’

‘What was the worst of it?’ Still I saw the words, PESSIMISTIC GLOBETROTTER, but I took pleasure in the way Trevor, concentrating on his story, dealt with his newspaper by folding it in quarters and tucking it under his bottom, the teasing headline pressed under one buttock.

‘Went ashore for the post, didn’t I? Was a “Dear John” letter, wasn’t it? And they thought I’d go mental like the skipper, so they discharged me before I could take a header off the ship. Called me wife, didn’t I? She says, “There’s nothing to discuss, Trevor” and “Why are you shouting?” And she bloody hangs up on me, doesn’t she? So I went home and we split up. It was horrible. Now her boyfriend goes around saying, “Trevor refuses to have a drink with me.” ’

Trevor’s story and the Star somewhat colored my view of the Cape Peninsula. We crossed a great empty herbaceous moorland of purply-blue fynbos, low bush shaking in the wind, as aromatic as the maquis in Corsica, miles of trembling herbs. Some wild things roamed here — eland and ostrich, children on school outings, baboons, tourists.

‘Tutta la famiglia!’ an Italian woman on the bus screeched, seeing some peevish baboons by the roadside baring their teeth at her.

When the bus stopped at this, the uttermost end of Africa, I got out. Trevor followed along. He lingered to buy a souvenir baseball cap lettered Cape Point on the crown. I kept walking, to the lookout, down to the sloping trail, to the narrow path in the bright afternoon, through the gusting wind. On my left, the cliff dropped away 200 feet to frothy ocean. I walked to Dias Point — Bartolomeo Dias was here in 1488 — and farther on, to Cape Point itself, jutting like the prow of a ship over the bright sea, until I reached the last of the warnings, No Access Beyond this Point, and Do Not Throw Stones, and End of Trail.