The Last Train to Zona Verde: My Ultimate African Safari

3. Cape Town: The Spirit of the Cape

NOTHING, APPARENTLY, is hidden in Cape Town: it is a city like an amphitheater. Its air breathing upon me sweetly, I sat in elegant, embowered, villa-rich Constantia, the district on the ridge I’d glimpsed the day before from the shacks of Khayelitsha. I was sipping a glass of sauvignon blanc in the majestic portico that was the tasting room of the main house at Constantia Glen Vineyard. From this vantage point I was able to see over the rim of my wine glass the poisonous cloud of dust that hung above the Cape Flats.

This visibility is one of the unusual features of Cape Town. The estates in its wealthiest enclaves, in the cliffy suburbs of the middle slopes of the mountain (Constantia, Rondebosch, Bishopscourt, Newlands), have views of the bleak horizontal profile of the suffering squatter camps and poor sprawling townships on the flatland below. The orderly green vineyards look down on brown muddled scrubland, and likewise, through the wide gaps in the plank walls or the rips in the blue plastic of the shacks in Khayelitsha it is possible to enjoy a panorama of university buildings and colonnades bulking on the heights of leafy Rondebosch.

Gated communities all over these highlands display signs warning any unwelcome intruder of 24/7 MONITORING AND ARMED RESPONSE, yet the poor have an unimpeded view of the rich, and vice versa. And each exposed person, squinting from this distance, looks passive and ubiquitous, like a sort of human vegetation.

The last time I’d been in Cape Town this winery did not exist — no vines, no casks, no activity except the mooing of cows. It had been a dairy farm, bought by an entrepreneur named Alexander Weibel, who’d had money and been interested in making wine. He plowed the hills and discovered that the land had clayey subsoil, had good water-holding capacity, and was rich in mica that would impart a “distinctive minerality,” as he called it, to the white wine. He planted vines, fenced them, staked them, pruned them. He invested in winemaking equipment, and in 2007 he had his first harvest. His wine was acclaimed. All this within ten years.

“I know that’s Khayelitsha,” I said, looking down at the townships on the Flats.

“And that’s Mitchells Plain,” the helpful woman in the wine-tasting portico told me. “And Guguletu, and over there, past Langa, is Bonteheuwel. Coloreds live there.”

Almost half the population of Cape Town was “colored.” The word had not been abandoned, and neither had “coolie” (koelie), for Indian; though “Bantu,” “Muntu,” “native,” “kaffir,” and “Hottentot” were execrated and condemned. A supermarket manager, technically “colored,” referred to one of his employees as a Hottentot while I was in Cape Town. (He pronounced the word the South African way, “Hot-not.”) Someone overheard this and reported him to a superior. He was fired on the spot.

The township of Bonteheuwel was created when the old, lively, multiracial District Six, in central Cape Town, was bulldozed, and the different races were dispersed and resettled, each to a specific place with its own racial hue. That was how, with refugees and exiles, Bonteheuwel grew. It is known as much for the distinctiveness of its people as for the violence of its crime. Much of Bonteheuwel is controlled by street gangs, and unlike the rest of the townships with their random shootings and beatings, the Bonteheuwel gangs are organized, with menacing names, and engaged in endless drug and turf wars. What Bonteheuwel had in common with the other townships was that, with all its hardships and disorder, it was also a place with a life of its own, where music and art filled the clubs and galleries, and where residents set off in the morning to work in central Cape Town or to attend school.

It was from Bonteheuwel that twenty-two-year-old Donna-Lee de Kock traveled each morning with her mother to the Old Mutual Insurance building in Pinelands — a one-and-a-half-hour commute — to attend the Tertiary School in Business Administration. That’s where I met Donna-Lee and her classmates. Ostensibly I was there to give a talk, but my deeper motive was to find out about the school and perhaps discover, after my time wandering around the townships, something promising.

This tertiary school, known by its acronym, TSiBA (the Xhosa word for “jump”), was good news. It was privately funded and nonprofit. I was particularly interested because the school had opened in 2005, since I had last been in South Africa. In the beginning 80 students were enrolled; there were now 320. No student was required to pay any tuition or fees, though it cost $10,000 a year to educate each one — for food, textbooks, transportation, computer, and writing materials. All the pupils were studying business administration or economics, and all were aiming to start businesses. The school’s mission was to make something good happen. I liked its self-sufficiency, and its being a purely South African endeavor — not an institution imposed by a meddling Mrs. Jellyby, a foreign philanthropist, or a parachuting pop star. Nor was it connected to any government or politician.

Allowances were made for students from deprived educational backgrounds. If someone applied and was found to be worthy of consideration, but deficient in any academic area, a “bridging year” was provided to sharpen needed skills and bring him or her up to standard. The aim of the school was to provide a college education for young people who otherwise would not have access to it — those who were too poor or out of touch or badly prepared.

The school was founded by Leigh Meinert, a young woman from Cape Town who had degrees from universities in South Africa and Great Britain. Idealistic, white, from a winemaking family, she was committed to making a difference in South Africa. Her father, Martin Meinert, learned winemaking at his family’s Devon Valley vineyard and also had a degree in viticulture and oenology from the University of Stellenbosch. With her father’s encouragement, Leigh Meinert worked on a plan for higher education in South Africa that would reach out to ambitious, intelligent, but overlooked youths.

“I saw how insular my generation was, how little we knew about each other and how isolated we were from the richness of different cultures around us,” Leigh Meinert had told a newspaper interviewer the year before I visited, summing up the situation she’d been born into in South Africa, at the time of Nelson Mandela’s release from twenty-seven years in prison. “I wanted to do something to change that. Particularly at that exciting time, I wanted to be involved in building the nation, and to work specifically among people of my generation to integrate and build leadership.”

These were rosy generalities, but she went to work to make them real. She had been developing the school for seven years and was still only in her early thirties. When I met her she was eight months pregnant, but she laughed at my suggestion that this might be a reason to slow down.

“Do you get any money from the government?” I asked.

“None at all — no government money!” And she laughed. “It’s a free university. Maybe it’s not a good idea to say that!”

“So how does this operate?”

“Old Mutual gives us space, and we get donations from companies, who also act as mentors. It’s not complicated, though it took us a year just to plan it. It takes a lot of cooperation. And work.”

“What happens to the graduates?”

“The companies that are our donors often hire them, or they might join other companies or start businesses of their own. The guiding philosophy is that after they get their degree they’ll pay it forward. They’ll give money or support or time — they’ll give back. Because their own education was paid for by someone else.”

This was a paraphrase of something she’d written and published: “Our students do not pay back their scholarships. The model, however, is designed to ensure that they pay forward through the transfer of the skills they have learned, through civic engagement and through social responsibility. We also endeavor to include them in the day-to-day running of the operation, which is not only in line with our endeavors to build leadership and entrepreneurship but also helps us keep the management team lean, flexible, young and innovative.”

This seemed so hopeful, and consequently so unlikely, that I questioned it. “Do they actually come up with the money?”

“Yes, look!” she said. We were walking down a hallway as she gestured to the framed pictures on the wall. “These are some of them.”

Each portrait was headed A Pay It Forward Hero, with details of the former student’s academic history, present occupation, and how money or time was paid back to the school.

This seemed, in my experience in Africa, one of those rare, grassroots educational efforts that had actually succeeded. Here were clean classrooms, a library with books on the shelves, working computers, lights, running water, with spirited, serious, motivated students — and no foreign patronage. TSiBA had plans to move to a bigger building and was looking for more support.

The school certainly deserved it. The most sought-after postgraduate grant in South Africa was the Mandela-Rhodes Scholarship, which fully funded two years of study for “young Africans who exhibit academic prowess as well as broader leadership potential, an educational opportunity unique on the continent.” Mandela himself, in inaugurating the jointly named scholarship in 2003, had said, “It speaks of a growing sense of global responsibility that in this second century of its operation the Rhodes Trust finds it appropriate to redirect some of its attention and resources back to the origins of [its] wealth.”

Only thirty Mandela-Rhodes Scholarships were awarded in the whole of Africa each year. In the short time the school had been open, Leigh Meinert’s students had bagged four of them.

Like other students at TSiBA, Donna-Lee de Kock, from the distant township of Bonteheuwel, was studying for a BA in business administration. Her mixed ancestry of African, Chinese, Indian, and white flickered in her features.

“I want to finish here and then go to a cosmetology school,” she told me, “get a degree there, and then start my own business.”

In the school library with about fifteen of the students, I asked them about their plans. Each one had the ambition of starting a business, and was specific about the time it would take, the study it required, the various steps. They were frank about the slowing economy, the high unemployment, and when I asked pointedly about government corruption, they merely smiled: they knew. They were unanimous on one point.

“We all have an aspiration to get out of the townships,” one of them said.

Lingering in Cape Town, looking for more good news, I heard about an older migrant labor camp, called Lwandle, that had reinvented itself as a township and put itself on the map with its new museum. I got a ride there. Less than thirty miles from the center of Cape Town, Lwandle was another example of Cape Town proximity, the poor dusty township visible from the heights of the wealthy green city. In this case, miserable Lwandle in Somerset West was adjacent to the old lovely town of Stellenbosch, with its wineries and its university, under the steep and striated mountain ridge still known as Hottentots Holland.

The distinguishing feature of Lwandle was its high self-esteem, which was reflected in its self-promotion. Its showcase, the Lwandle Migrant Labor Museum, displayed its history over sixty years. The township had its own historian too, who greeted me and showed me around.

His name was Mr. Lunga Smile — as, he explained, in “smile for the camera” — and he had been educated at the local secondary school, Khanyolwetho High School. He was a cheery soul with a jumping, loose-limbed way of walking, like a man kicking a ball, and along with his outward energy was an eagerness to inform. He wore a warm plaid jacket and wool cap on this chilly overcast day, which gave an even greater bleakness to the wilderness of huts and hostels.

Like his counterpart Archie, the historian of Langa township across the Flats, Mr. Smile of Lwandle was able to convert his cheeriness into a sense of outrage when he pointed out the indignities suffered by township dwellers over the years.

“This was how the poor people lived before,” he said. “Look at the bad construction. No running water. No heating.”

To demonstrate the former hardships of the residents, one of the hostels, dating from 1958, had been preserved unchanged. It was a cinderblock one-story structure without heat or water, divided into different-sized cubicles, the smaller ones designated for sixteen people, the larger ones holding as many as thirty-eight.

“They were all men, working in the canning factories,” Mr. Smile said.

It was the familiar story: men in search of work who had left their homes and families in the Eastern Cape to live in migrant labor hostels outside Cape Town. There, they were employed in the fertile Stellenbosch Valley by farmers as fruit and vegetable pickers and grape harvesters, and by the factories that processed and canned these products.

But the main employer, the Gant food and canning factory, had shut down in the 1980s, and with the vineyards more highly mechanized, fewer laborers were needed. I had come hoping to find good news, but I was discovering another paradox. The majority of the people in Lwandle were now unemployed, yet the resident population was increasing, and was idle. Lwandle and its nearby squatter camp were now home to eighty thousand people.

Mr. Smile led me through the old, cold, gritty building, with its dead air, its scorched walls, and its outside toilets with six bucket stalls.

“They had to empty the buckets by hand, carrying them over there,” Mr. Smile said. “And a woman was not safe here. She could be assaulted when she was doing her business.”

I clucked, made notes, and walked around the awful place, designated as Building 33, and Mr. Smile continued talking.

“This is where they lived — see, how close together!” He darted into a back room where some shelves represented beds. “They would say, ‘My bed is my home.’ ”

I clucked some more, scribbled again, noting the dirty cement floors, the rooms like prison cells, the filthy ceilings, the windows so begrimed and unwashed I couldn’t see through the glass.

“This is our heritage!”

Then I saw a hand-lettered cardboard sign and asked, “What’s that?”

“It was put there by the people who lived here before.”

“Before what?”

“Before it was made into a museum,” Mr. Smile said. “They are objecting.”

I copied the sign. It read: WE THE RESIDENTS OF ROOM 33 DESIDE TO WRITE THIS NOTICE DISAGREE WITH THE PEOPLE ABOUT THIS ROOM TO BE A MESSEUM. FIRSTLY GIVE US ACCOMMODATION BEFORE TO GET THIS ROOM. THANK YOU — FROM ROOM 33.

So the people who had been living in the hovel, who had been evicted in order to make the place a museum piece representing the worst example of a slum, wanted urgently to return and inhabit the hovel as they had always done; bad as it was, they were worse off where they lived now. They wanted their hovel back, even if it meant pigging it there.

“Where are they now?”

“Maybe a squatter camp,” Mr. Smile said.

“So how is this better than it was before?”

“Now each person has his own space” — and by “space” he meant elbow room in the hovel — “rather than sharing it.”

Former migrant labor hostels had been converted into dwellings for families, but they were just as crowded, dirty, and unheated. Small children, ragged and barefoot, chased each other on a chilly evening, running past a wall with a painting of Steve Biko, killed by police during the apartheid era, one of the martyrs of the freedom struggle. Not far from where we were talking, a woman was doing her laundry, slapping at wet clothes in a small public sink fixed to a standpipe by the dirt road.

The museum at Lwandle had been more successful than the cultural committee at Lwandle might have intended, since the whole of the township seemed to be preserved as a grubby reminder of the bad old days persisting into the present. The only difference was that instead of Lwandle serving as a camp for overworked men, it was now a camp of unemployed families, scraping by on handouts and menial labor.

The Migrant Labor Museum contained a display of photographs of residents of Lwandle, most of them women — “domestics,” Mr. Smile said, explaining that they had been house servants for white families in Stellenbosch.

They were portraits of older women sitting in rough chairs in humble surroundings. One showed a stout woman in a voluminous dress. Her name was given, Nontuthzelo Christine Makhebane. A succinct caption in her own words summed up her melancholy existence here:

My home is where I was born. I am only staying here. My home is Ngqamakhwe. I only work here. But my future where I would die is Ngqamakhwe.

Ngqamakhwe, which I found on a map, was a tiny rural settlement halfway across the country, in the green bosom of the Eastern Cape.

“Why do these people come here if there’s so little work?” I asked Mr. Smile.

“Because of drought in their village,” he said. “Because of no food in the house. Because they have hopes.”

And because, as Elias Canetti points out in Crowds and Power, people feel more secure in a crowd; so they flee the emptiness and insecurity of the countryside to seek consolation in an urban slum crowd, even a futureless and filthy one, like this in Lwandle.

In the thickening dusk and the dirty light, skinny children, some of them barefoot, were kicking a ball across a stony patch of ground and screaming at each other and then hooting at me as I passed.

Each evening in Cape Town, after traipsing through the townships, I returned to my luxury hotel. The difference in circumstances was emphatic, and the implications made me cringe. I was well aware that in the nineteenth century, wealthy, voyeuristic Londoners headed to the slums of the East End for the thrill of the gutter — the word “slumming” dates from 1884. During Prohibition, white New Yorkers looked for booze and exoticism in outings to the poorest parts of Harlem and the Bowery. Today, such social descents are a recognized branch of the travel industry; so-called slum tourism exists in India and South America and is a brisk business in South Africa.

Slum tourism perhaps originated when the first passionately nosy tourist met a hungry slum dweller who recognized a lawful opportunity and, instead of contemplating robbery, guided the tourist — for a fee — to see the people of the abyss. The poorest Africans began to realize that the very fact of their poverty engaged many foreign visitors who — associating poverty with danger and failure — could not possibly indulge themselves this way back home.

This sort of tourism has been denounced as “poverty porn” and exploitation, monetizing the misery of slum dwellers who had nothing else to offer. For some day-trippers, the experience was an extreme example of curiosity bordering on voyeurism, the leering intention of the alien tourist to feel the shiver of difference, the horror interest that was indistinguishable from slumming. But there were others — sympathetic, charity-minded outsiders — who were moved to contribute money as well as to gape, and having seen the slum they were contributing with a degree of understanding. As I had seen myself, early visitors and volunteers in the squatter camp of New Rest, with a genuine desire to help, had been instrumental in supporting a clinic and a nursery. And they had played a part in transforming the camp into a viable township.

Voyeurism is an element in much, perhaps most, of travel, but even so, I believed my visits were neither horror-driven nor high-minded. “When some people travel they merely contemplate what is before their eyes,” the Taoist Lieh Tzu said. “When I travel, I contemplate the processes of mutability.”

Of course I wanted to prettify my intentions — what traveler doesn’t? — but I did think Lieh Tzu’s point of view summed up how I felt: not slumming, not patronizing, but looking for changes. (And maybe a bit of voyeurism too; otherwise, why not stay home?) I wanted to see changes, and I had found many: the hovels-to-houses development at New Rest, the establishment of the Tertiary School in Business Administration in Pinelands, the diminishing of attacks with sticks and stones on Khayelitsha railway cars, and a general sense of uplift in the city. Seeing differences like that (the process of mutability) seems to me one of the purposes of travel, and often suggests how the world changes and gives glimpses of the future.

But after a day’s immersion, I always went back to my hotel. My hotel was splendid — and slightly worrying for its splendor, because a hotel can be so much like home that it becomes a barrier to understanding the outside world and its discomforts. The pleasure of being at the hotel made me procrastinate; I knew that when I left it I would be traveling into the unknown — at least for me: I had never taken the road north out of Cape Town, toward Namibia, Botswana, Angola, and perhaps beyond. I had a map, and some money, and months ahead of me.

My hotel, the Taj Cape Town, had a spa where I sometimes got a massage (“Guest is God, sir, allow me to wash your feet”), and an Indian gourmet restaurant where I could be found most evenings tucking into my tandoori, my shirt front scattered with poppadom crumbs. Coffee and cream buns were served every afternoon in the lobby, where I sat in a leather armchair and read the latest installment in the Cape Times of the racist rants of one of South Africa’s rising demagogues, Julius Malema, or wrote of my day’s events in my notebook.

Capetonians tended to wince when I told them I was going to yet another township, much as a New Yorker might show bafflement — and rightly so — toward a visitor in Manhattan saying he’d spent the day in Brownsville, in Brooklyn, where there are eighteen low-income public housing projects, of somber and unprepossessing aspect. New Yorkers had now and then challenged me in this very way. Yet one of my most enlightening weeks in New York had been spent wandering in Brownsville and the South Bronx, gathering material for an essay (“Subterranean Gothic”) about the far reaches of the New York subway system.

“Why do Africans invite people to see their misery?” a South African friend asked me. It was a frequent question. “And why do people go on these township tours?”

He happened to be a chef, a traveler, and a foodie. To introduce me to Cape Town’s gourmet food scene, he had brought me to Aubergine Restaurant. I started my meal with crayfish bisque involtini with daikon and asparagus, and he ordered game-fish carpaccio, Namibian crab salad, and seared scallops accented by mizuna coulis. For my entrée I had seared ostrich fillet “accented with buffalo mozzarella and Cape gooseberries,” and he chose rolled rabbit saddle with strips of crispy rabbit belly, flavored with lardo, served on a haricot vert purée. He went on badgering me about slum tourism while I listed for him the miseries I had seen in the townships, which for me was every bit as arresting and unusual as the seared ostrich fillet with gooseberries, and much more enlightening.

“This 2005 Boekenhoutskloof from Franschhoek is an excellent pairing with the ostrich.”

“Yes, just a touch more, thanks. What was I saying?”

“You were going on about the squatter camps.”

I thought then, and I still believe, that the only way to understand a city is to see its periphery, because that’s where the workers generally live, the people who are employed to maintain it — who were probably the ones sweeping the crumbs off this table at the Aubergine and others in the back prepping the food. A city cannot function without such people. That was as true of New York as of Cape Town: city workers never lived downtown, but rather on the fringes, in the townships, and commuted by train or minibus to their jobs. The woman who made my bed at the Taj — a venerable building, once a bank, which shimmered near the park and botanical garden known as the Company Gardens — this smiling, wheezing soul who always asked in a welcoming way if I was enjoying myself, clocked off each day to return to her humble home in a dusty township on the Cape Flats.

My foodie friend said I should take a tour around the mountain to see the tidy seaside communities. I did that the next day, with Claire Jones driving and narrating. Claire had come out from England as a small girl long ago. She’d thought of leaving during the oppressive years of apartheid, but had stayed and been exhilarated by the political changes, the release of Mandela, the new prosperity, the World Cup.

“It’s my home. I travel, of course, all the time. But I always come back. I don’t want to live anywhere else.”

She took me down the west-facing coast and the high cliffs (“and those rocks are the Twelve Apostles, but don’t count them, there’s more than twelve”) to Sea Point, Bantry Bay, Clifton, and Hout Bay (“they used to issue passports here, as a joke”), then over to Scarborough, where on a bench a huge nanny in a pinafore and floppy sun hat held a tiny white girl in her vast soft lap. We then went over the ridge — glimpses of knuckle-walking baboons — to Simons Town (and a new category of tourist: chattering, well-heeled tourists from the People’s Republic of China); to Boulders Beach to look at the jackass penguins I’d seen ten years before — but many more of them now, and better protected; and up the shore of False Bay to Fish Hoek and Glencairn and Kalk Bay, where the fishermen were just purring into the harbor, in their beamy wooden open-decked boats, with crates of freshly caught kingklip — all-Xhosa crews, all raised as fishermen, their blackness set off by yellow oilskins.

It was a simple jaunt. I was sightseeing, an aimless, usually goofy activity I generally disparage for its self-indulgence, but the sights were beautiful, the food was excellent, the weather was perfect — it was all so undemandingly pleasant there was nothing to write about; and I had the feeling that once I left, I would be on a bumpy road, headed through dust into uncertainty.

And something else held me back too: a nagging thought that kept me idling, in a way cowering, in the comforts of Cape Town. It was the morbid belief that I might not return, not just to Cape Town, but home; that I was setting off to suffer and die.

As a young man, I never entertained this idea of death in travel. I had set off for Africa almost fifty years ago with the notion that my life had at last begun, that I was free in this great green continent, liberated from my family and its paternalism just at the time many African countries had liberated themselves from the paternalistic hand of colonialism. And when Africans told me how they had been repressed, confined, belittled, exploited, and infantilized by their colonial overlords, be it Britain, Belgium, Portugal, or France, I thought of my fierce mother saying, “It’s your own damn fault” and “You’re not going anywhere — you have no gumption,” and my father saying, “Get a job — money doesn’t grow on trees” and “Why are you so defiant?” and “Why do you write trash?”

So Africa had been deliverance for me, a liberating embrace and an opportunity. Many people feel that same relief, happiness, and sense of possibility on first arriving in Africa. Africans themselves inspire it. And in Africa I had at last something to write. At that time, the early and mid-1960s, many parts of the continent, remote and seldom visited, beckoned to me. I became a teacher in a small school in Malawi and then a professor at Makerere University in Uganda. On vacations, I traveled to the Congo, Nigeria, Ghana, and Kenya, up and down Malawi, and to the Lower Shire River, a marshy tributary of the Zambezi. I got married in Uganda, and my first child was born there. Africa gave me everything. I never thought of death: Africa had given me life.

But my good luck in travel had held for so long that it was bound to give out at some point, and surely soon. Africa had changed. Countries I had loved to visit had imploded or failed, and the people themselves often said, pleadingly, “We are hopeless, sir,” as they extended their hands, appealing for money. I would soon leave for the malarial part of Africa, the pushing-and-shoving part, where life was precarious, where there wasn’t enough food or water, where buses gasped down the bad roads, and where people had been so thoroughly abandoned by their governments, so left to their own resources, they were possessed by their own fears for survival. Why should any of them care about an aging white man asking nosy questions and scribbling the answers in his notebook?

In a life of travel, I had been in awful places and taken foolish risks, and I had survived. I always thought of myself as the Fortunate Traveler. But at some point even the luckiest person, full of hope, opens a door and finds a skeletal reflection on the other side. And so the traveler each morning in the mirror, like Webster in Eliot’s poem, becomes much possessed by death, and sees the skull beneath the skin, the hollow eye sockets, the lipless grin.

In my last few days in Cape Town, I prowled the markets and shops. Many of them sold industrial curios for tourists, fake masks and beads and baskets, though a few small shops had the genuine article: old carvings and village implements — stools, trophy staffs, digging sticks, ritual objects. I love old wooden objects that have been handled and used: the stool that has been polished by a skidding bottom, the symmetrical neck rest that has supported the drowsing head of its owner for many years, the wooden bowl with its pumpkin-colored patina, the ivory bracelet darkened by the wearer’s wrist, the fetish object glowing with the nervous chafing of superstitious fingers. I found a Yaka fetish, a staring, open-mouthed cubist figure with a long neck and nothing else, carved out of black wood, small enough to hold in my hand. It seemed to be a frightener. The Yaka people straddle the border of the Congo and Angola, most of them near the Kwango River at the edge of the topmost part of Angola, where I was headed. It became my personal fetish and protector.

And I bought a detailed map and a bus ticket.

The last item on my Cape Town wish list was a boat ride. I longed to get a view of the city from the sea. I had never been on a boat offshore. My modest request was converted by some well-wishers into a picnic on a fifty-six-foot motor yacht, The Spirit of the Cape. The name was appropriate: it was the spirit of the Cape that I wanted to feel. We set off from a mooring next to the Cape Grace Hotel and sailed past the docks and the pedestrian swing-bridge into Table Bay, six of us on board, good companions, great food, the lovely sea, and looming above us the mountain that had been first glimpsed by the Portuguese explorer Bartolomeu Dias in 1488; he called it Cabo das Tormentas for the torments of its storms and rough seas.

On this blindingly bright day, a cold wind gusting in from the south, we sailed about three miles offshore and then coasted south, past Table Mountain, monumental in the sunlight, the numerous Apostles arrayed in rock near the summit, the city scattered across their granite robes. Anyone knowing its history, especially its recent history, could be confident that Cape Town was a city with a future, one that inspired the notion that all things are possible. Robben Island, just offshore, was no longer a penal colony, and its most famous prisoner had guided the country to freedom and was still alive and smiling, affectionately known to all by his clan name, Madiba.

The plateau to the south was a national park, where troops of chacma baboons frowned and skittered amid the low-growing, sweet-smelling bushes that Afrikaners called fynbos. The land looked blessed, the uttermost end of the earth, a paradise — as it was when its only inhabitants were hunter-gatherers who called themselves the Real People. As a passage to the East Indies, it had been renamed Good Hope.

On The Spirit of the Cape we drank beer and ate cold pink prawns and slices of pizza. We talked about travel, and I learned from my fellow picnickers that the Cape is the home of The Flying Dutchman, the ghost ship that sails endlessly and is a lesson to all travelers, especially to those who overreach themselves. And — since the legend was based on an actual overzealous captain — to travelers who don’t know when to stop.

“So, Paul, where are you headed?”

I began fumblingly to describe my itinerary. Several of the men had been to Namibia, but none to Tsumkwe in the remote northeast, home of the Ju/’hoansi people, where I hoped to go. None of the men had seen Angola, though they knew ex-soldiers who’d been — the South African army had fought there, laid land mines there, and bombed the towns, fighting against Namibian guerrillas as well as supporting one of the factions in the twenty-seven-year Angolan civil war. But these days Angola was pretty much terra incognita, noted for its oil reserves, its many unexploded land mines, and its isolation.

“Are you sure you want to go there?”

I said, “Oh, yes. I’m looking forward to it.”

“The roads are supposed to be really awful.”

I said, “I’m not in a hurry.”

“Probably no roads at all in some of the places.”

It would have been pretentious to say “I follow no path, the path follows me,” but it was, pompously, how I felt.

I said, “There’s always a way if you’re not in a hurry.”

“You can see it all here,” the captain said. He switched on the GPS, and soon in lighted segments the west coast of southern Africa appeared on the screen. He dialed it larger and scrolled up.

“There’s the northern part, Namaqualand and the interior,” he said, his fingers spider-walking on the screen. “That smooth part of the coast — there are diamond mines all over it. That hook is Luderitz, where Namibia starts. There’s Walvis Bay — lots of shipping there. And Swakopmund, and the Skeleton Coast.”

“See that line?” one of the others said. “That’s the Kunene River, the border of Angola. I’ve been up there in a helicopter with safari clients, but not over it. No one goes across except the Himba.”

The Himba people were seminomadic herders, venerators of fire, famously traditional and handsome in beads and shell ornaments, red clay clotting the women’s long braids.

As The Spirit of the Cape turned near an old, partly submerged wreck at Clifton, and rode the swell back to the harbor, the captain helpfully traced the meandering line with his fingertip, indicating the watercourse border that divided Namibia from Angola. But the map had so little detail, its simple topography glowing on the screen in the wheelhouse, it seemed to depict a land unknown and undiscovered.