The Last Train to Zona Verde: My Ultimate African Safari

4. The Night Bus to Windhoek

LIKE A SHEEPISH BOY, round-shouldered and self-conscious, slumping in his father’s expensive car and going off to school, I said, “Yusuf, please drop me here,” as the powerful black Mercedes approached the bus station. The station entrance was indistinct in the early morning mist. I preferred to be anonymous. Well, who wouldn’t? No one is more conspicuous than a person sliding out of a big limo to climb onto a beat-up bus. But the hotel concierge had insisted, wishing to give me a good send-off, and it seemed churlish to refuse. At a discreet distance — Yusuf heeding my request — I jumped out before he could open my door. He was smiling, chuckling softly, as he shook my hand and gave me the morning paper, a neatly folded Cape Argus.

“Good journey, sir.” Jinny.

“You’re smiling because I’m taking the bus,” I said, breathing diesel fumes from the idling buses.

“Not at all, sir.”

“Why, then?”

“Because you have bought a one-way ticket only, sir.” Tucket.

Yes, I did not know how far I’d get, or whether I was coming back this way. It was a leap in the dark, northerly, in the direction of the Congo.

The whole color spectrum of South African racial identities was represented at the station, preparing to board the bus: black, Indian, Cape Malay, “colored,” Chinese, and some beefy Boers, all of us headed to Springbok and the border, and perhaps across it. No formalities except a perfunctory ritual with the driver, who held a clipboard and checked my name. It was casual and orderly, with no security, no delay; as soon as we were on the bus, we were driven out of the city, toward Namibia and l’Afrique profonde, into the gut of the greenest continent.

I sat by the window reading the Cape Argus, relishing the prospect of the long trip and catching up on the news. All week, in and out of the townships, I had been following the progress of a public battle between disciplinarians in the ruling party, the African National Congress, and Julius Malema, the boisterous president of its Youth League, who rejoiced in his own mayhem. Malema was always in the news for his offensive pronouncements: his shouted threats to whites and Indians, his demands that the mines should be nationalized, that Botswana must be invaded and its government overthrown, that the white-owned farms in South Africa be overrun and seized — handed wholesale to black South Africans — as had happened disastrously in Zimbabwe, a ruined country on the brink of bankruptcy that Malema admired and frequently visited.

Though he was depicted in the press as a buffoon, and had three convictions in South African courts for uttering hate speech, Malema was a possible future leader of South Africa. Indeed, he was a leader now, though a divisive one. Only thirty years old, but wealthy, dangerous, and vindictive, he was just reckless enough to seek the highest office. The current president, Jacob Zuma, who, as his mentor, seemed an older, cannier version of this arrogant bully, had begun to fear him. Like Zuma, Malema had — so newspaper investigations reported — enriched himself through shady deals and backhanders in state contracts. As a result, he owned a newly built mansion in a posh suburb of Johannesburg.

Malema had presided over the Youth League since 2008, and pictures of him, fist upraised, ranting at a microphone, from year to year showed him sequentially swelling, an intense black wire of a man transformed, growing fatter and balder until his big smooth head was almost without features, like an overinflated balloon with eyes swollen to wicked slits, a face that did not achieve any expression except when, with popping eyes and bared teeth, he succeeded in inspiring fear by spreading racist menace.

Popular among the black urban poor for his unapologetic insults, his bellowed speeches were widely quoted. So were his unruly press conferences, where he went out of his way to humiliate journalists and anyone else who disagreed with him, especially members of the foreign press. His abuse was memorable for being blunt: “stupid,” “imperialist,” “little tea girl,” “go away!” It seemed that no one in the government knew what to do with him, and that malicious thought gave him pleasure, because the more he was censured, the greater was his defiance.

Those noisy obedient souls who were his following had the leisure to show up any time, anywhere they were summoned, to cheer him, wave signs, and jump up and down — his audience’s peculiar display of approval was energetic jumping, giving a Malema rally the look of an enormous aerobics class. These jumpers were nearly all young, unemployed males from the townships — hardly reassuring to Malema’s opponents (of whom there were many) since the largest proportion of out-of-work South Africans lived in the townships. They were the many millions with nothing to do and nowhere to go, for whom Malema offered a diabolical sort of hope in the politics of racial incitement.

Demagoguery in Africa, as far as speechifying was concerned, had never mattered much. Though spitting and screaming speeches were fairly common among up-and-coming party hacks, a gift for oratory was not crucial to an African politician aiming to be a tyrant. The traditional chiefs and kings did not engage in public speaking, but merely whispered their wishes to their right-hand man — the porte-parole in West African kingship, the “chief’s messenger” in East and Central Africa — the mouthpiece who conveyed the words that had to be obeyed.

Though the sympathies and howls of the rabble, the poor, the mob, might be helpful, they were seldom decisive factors in promoting a man to power, unless the mob was also well armed. In every African tyranny it was the army’s loyalty to the leader and its impartial cruelty that made the difference. Once a leader established himself as a dictator, he controlled his country through the army and the police, supplemented by the thuggery of self-appointed intimidators in the ruling party’s youth league. Speechmaking was irrelevant; if you had armed men on your side, no further persuasion was needed. An African dictator could be a mute and merciless enforcer and spend many decades in power without ever being seen in public.

But, oddly and perhaps unique to Africa, music always mattered to the political process. Never mind the speeches — who had the patience to listen to the lies? Along with the gun, music was the most persuasive influence in African political life, as it was in African culture; politics was dominated by rousing songs. This had always been the case. In the early 1960s in Nyasaland (soon to be Malawi) the defining song was “Zonse Zimene za Kamuzu Banda” — “Everything Belongs to Kamuzu Banda,” both a hymn and a prediction, in praise of the incoming prime minister, sung in villages, at political meetings, and by the students at my little school. Banda took power, suppressed and jailed the opposition, and went on to rule (the music still playing) for the next thirty-four years.

South Africa’s President Jacob Zuma had his personal anthem, which he sang and danced to in public at every opportunity. It was a song from the struggle, about his machine gun.

Umshini wami, umshini wami (My machine gun, my machine gun)

We Baba (O Father)

Awulethu, umshini wami (Please bring me my machine gun)

An inconvenient fact is that South Africa was not liberated by all-out war and certainly not by machine-gun-toting guerrillas. There was no Gettysburg in South Africa, only the waste ground of Sharpeville, which was the site of a one-sided massacre of sixty-nine unarmed protesters. Mandela was not sprung from Robben Island by an indignant mob in a mass, Bastille-storming movement of prisoner liberation. Toward the end of his sentence, Mandela was secretly transferred to a serene, bucolic, country-house setting in the winelands where, with the connivance of the white government, he quietly awaited elections and the transfer of power.

Violent protest, sabotage, and armed struggle had been factors, but not decisive ones, in South African independence, which was gained through stubbornness, labor unrest, paralyzing strikes, public disorder, backroom negotiations, economic sanctions, and especially foreign pressure. The South African army was well armed and overwhelming. Independence was not taken but given, and was long overdue, in the drip-drip-drip of history’s inevitability. Zuma’s machine-gun anthem, and his war dance to its tune, was merely grimly comic posturing, but it had symbolic value to a populace that still felt aggrieved.

Julius Malema — uneducated, corrupt, canny, crazy-acting, and power mad — much resembled Zuma. He was one of Zuma’s supporters and had a personal anthem too, called “Shoot the Boer.” Like Zuma, he sang it with exaggerated gusto, hamming it up. You might be excused for thinking — if you didn’t know the meaning of the words — that this was exuberant clowning, like a turn in a minstrel show, mimicking an “end man” in blackface, shuffling and playing for laughs; the only prop lacking was a banjo or a tambourine.

But he was serious. A huge headline in the Cape Argus I was reading on the bus concerned Malema, denouncing the man for defiantly leading his followers in singing his signature hate song because it seemed he would not stop singing it. “Shoot the Boer” was perfect for a black South African politician on the make — tuneful, with few words, easy to remember, anti-white, and an incitement to murder.

This song, too, had come out of the struggle, but the country had moved on, as it had moved on from Bring me my machine gun. Yet there were a great many people in South Africa who liked the message of murder and revenge, because many had yet to find any work, any wealth, any place for themselves, and they were envious of the visibly rich and enraged over them. These disaffected people were the township toughs who stoned trains, hijacked cars, and terrorized neighborhoods with brazen robberies that sent crime statistics soaring. With an annual homicide rate of 32,000, and rapes amounting to more than 70,000, South Africa led the world in 2011 in reported rapes and murders.

Given that “Shoot the Boer” advocated the killing of white farmers, it was another dire statistic that, since apartheid was banned in 1994, more than 3,000 white farmers had been murdered by black assassins. Most of the victims had been ambushed on isolated farms in the veldt. The anthem’s lyrics in Zulu were brutally simple:

Ayasab’ amagwala (The cowards are scared)

Dubula dubula (Shoot shoot)

Ayeah

Dubula dubula (Shoot shoot)

Ayasab’ amagwala (The cowards are scared)

Dubula dubula (Shoot shoot)

Awu yoh

Dubula dubula (Shoot shoot)

Aw dubul’ibhunu (Shoot the Boer)

Dubula dubula (Shoot shoot)

Except for the misguided folk who sang this with Malema at his political rallies, the song was condemned in newspaper editorials and by many citizens as hate speech, calling it an embarrassment and a backward step for the country.^*

But wait: one voice was raised in defense of Julius Malema, fat and sassy in his canary-yellow baseball cap and canary-yellow T-shirt, his fist raised, shouting “Shoot the Boer — shoot, shoot.” This supporting voice was the confident brogue of the Irish singer Paul Hewson, known to the world as the ubiquitous meddler Bono, the frontman of U2. He loved the song. The multimillionaire rocker, on his band’s “360-Degree Tour” in South Africa in 2011, had squinted through his expensive sunglasses, tipped his cowboy hat in respect, and asserted that “Shoot the Boer” had fondly put him in mind of the protest songs sung by the Irish Republican Army.

“When I was a kid and I’d sing songs,” Bono reminisced to the Sunday Times in Johannesburg, “I remember my uncles singing … rebel songs about the early days of the IRA.”

He treated the reporter to a ditty about an Irishman carrying a gun, and added, alluding to “Shoot the Boer,” “It’s fair to say it’s folk music.”

So willing was Bono to ingratiate himself — and, in his haste or ignorance, oblivious of the grotesque murder statistics and the horror of people who feared for their lives — that he went out of his way in his approval of the racist song, bolstering his argument with the observation that “Shoot the Boer” was a thoroughly Irish sentiment. Maybe so; though many disagreed, Irish and South Africans alike. His comments caused howls of rage by people in South Africa who noted the paradox that, just the year before, in April 2010, Bono (sharing the stage with former president Bill Clinton) had been honored by the Atlantic Council, which conferred on him the Distinguished Humanitarian Leadership Award.

And here I was, reading this in a bus headed north through the high veldt, with a man who might well have been a Zulu in the seat in front of me, an elderly black woman behind me, and two men who were undoubtedly Boer farmers conversing in Afrikaans in the seat across the aisle.

Into the heartland we went, down the main streets of small towns that were lined by the arcades and porticoes of hardware stores and old shops, past the immense farms and spectacular landscapes of the Northern Cape — a great relief, and uplifting after my experience of the dense dogtowns and squatter camps and townships and the fortified suburbs.

Many of the South Africans I’d met had wanted to be reassured. How are we doing? they’d asked, but obliquely. How did South Africa compare to the country I had seen on my trip ten years before and written about in Dark Star Safari? I could honestly say it was brighter and better, more confident and prosperous, though none of it was due to any political initiative. The South African people had made the difference, and would continue to do so, no thanks to a government that embarrassed and insulted them with lavish personal spending, selfishness, corruption, outrageous pronouncements, hollow promises, and blatant lies.

The new prosperity was evident as we traveled up the N1 highway past Century City, which was still being developed when I was last in South Africa and had grown to an enormous complex of houses, high-rises, and “the largest shopping mall in Africa,” Canal Walk, with hundreds of stores, resembling its sister stereotype, the residential community and shopping center in Florida or California, after which it had been modeled. And serving the same purpose: the middle-class flight from the city, seeking space and security. Well-funded and well-swept Century City was the opposite in every respect of the improvisational townships ten miles to the south of it.

Past a power station, a prison, and Corpus Christi Church (REFUEL HERE AND CONNECT WITH GOD confidently lettered on its sign out front), we swung north on a new road, passing more suburbs — and I noted that the more expensive-looking the home, the higher the perimeter fence or brick wall. In a republic of open country, one that celebrated the freedom of African space, every substantial dwelling was surrounded by walls, every house a fortress.

Up a road lined with gum trees through Durbanville, we passed the first heights of the green bosomy veldt, the gentle Tygerberg Hills, covered with grapevines in orderly rows. They were the extensive plantings of D’Aria Vineyards, composed of two wine farms, Doordekraal and Springfield. The first vintage of this winery was a sauvignon blanc, produced and offered for sale in 2005.

This fact I found out in the next town, Malmesbury, where the bus stopped for half an hour and I was able to talk to one of the Boers in the seat opposite.

His name was Hansie, a miner, headed to Springbok, but he had come this way often, noting the settlement and expansion of Durbanville and the nearby farming towns. This vineyard was no more than ten years old.

“There was nothing here before, just veldt and some old farms,”

Hansie said. “Now’s it’s a working wine farm.”

He asked me where I was from. I told him.

“You could have stayed at D’Aria instead of the city — it takes guests as well. Nice and quiet.”

Over the past decade he had seen the towns here grow, settled by Capetonians looking for a serene life in the hills. The place we had stopped, Malmesbury, was an example, a market town in an old farming district, surrounded by wheat fields, on Hansie’s route to Springbok. This town, too, had grown.

“Lots of new people here,” he said. “Lots of new shops. It’s coming up. And, ach, only thirty kilometers from Cape Town.”

Thitty kilometers, he said, and added that we were in Swartland, so called because of the bleck soil.

I wanted to ask Hansie about Julius Malema but did not have the heart to speak the name of a man who was obviously his nemesis. South Africans are not unusual in being sensitive about reminders of their history, but their recent past was so full of ambiguities none could say what the future might hold for them.

“Catch you later,” he said, releasing me so that he could, as he said, “buy an ass cream cone.”

Remembering I had no food or drink with me, I went into a large supermarket just off the main road which loomed like a warehouse and was stacked with merchandise, toppling crates and irregular piles of canned goods in ripped-open cardboard boxes.

The owners were Chinese, and their English was almost nonexistent. All I wanted were some bottles of water, which I couldn’t find until the woman at the register, with helpful ducklike nods and nasal yips, guided me from where she stood behind the counter. She and the man piling cans were perhaps some of the new people. They were the first of many immigrants from the People’s Republic that I was to meet on this trip, and though most of them were doing business in remote and unpromising places, they seemed content, absorbed, unflappable, even grateful, their feet squarely on the ground.

After Malmesbury, the countryside widened into an immensity of low hills and surrounding black ridges. As Hansie had said, the darkness of the soil had earned the region the name Swartland. It was only in such a rural place that South Africa made sense. This was its heartland, its food supply, gentle, settled, serene. I described in my diary the sunlit landscape, cattle browsing in the meadows, the distant farmhouses, the empty roads, the peacefulness.

I held that happy memory in my head, thinking of Malmesbury as a blissful realm, mentioning it later to my friends in Cape Town. And they referred me to a headline in the local newspaper, “Couple Attacked on Malmesbury Farm”:

A couple was attacked with an axe and steel pipe at their house outside of Malmesbury in the Western Cape this morning, police said.

Captain FC van Wyk said three men forced open the back door of the farmhouse around 3 am.

“They demanded money and other valuable items from the 30-year-old victim and his 26-year-old fiancée,” Van Wyk said.

“The intruders overpowered and assaulted the couple with an axe and a steel pipe. The man suffered multiple injuries to his back, chest, arms, and legs.”

The men ransacked the house and fled with wine and a DVD hi-fi system.

This assault immediately found its way to the Afrikaner Genocide Archives website, which was dense with accounts of attacks on farmers and other rural crimes, and gave more details about the incident in Malmesbury. The victims were Pieter Loubser and not his fiancée but his wife, Brenda, members of the Wes-Kaap Simmentaler cattle breeders’ club. The Loubsers ran a dairy farm — their milk, sold locally and in Cape Town, was one of the cheaper food items to be found in the townships. The other facts tallied: an early morning break-in by three men, an ax attack in the bedroom, the demand for money, the theft of valuables, the serious injuries. And another detail, something new: “Other news sources also say that Brenda was very brutally sexually assaulted.”

This account concluded: “Farm attacks place the food-security of this country in great danger. Irresponsible behaviour and statements by radical young black politicians are directly responsible for this — despite the fact that they themselves fatten themselves with food produced by those same farmers which are so badly maligned by these leaders.”

So anyone who believed, with Bono, that Malema’s song “Shoot the Boer” was no more than a harmless bit of folklore, and encouraged it to be sung like an Irish ditty, seemed to me an accessory to such assaults. It was obviously an incitement and made life hell for the people who lived on isolated farms. But by the time this crime took place, Bono and U2 were far away, singing somewhere else in the world, perhaps being awarded another prize for being humanitarians, leaving the local farmers here to face the music.

Back on the bus, we continued through farmland, past Mooreesberg and Piketberg, Swartland leading into deeper valleys until the rocky hills swelled to jagged mountains — no trees at all, only strange piled-up rocks like giant cairns, scattered with low scrub and the sweet-smelling fynbos that reminded me of the maquis of Corsica, whole hillsides of herbs among sharp cliffs and slopes of smashed rock — the roughest clusters of granite softened by sprouted wildflowers.

Descending to the town of Citrusdal, I was reminded of a young woman at a winery in Constantia whose grandparents farmed here, and I remembered the name Citrusdal for being so specific.

“Granny doesn’t speak a word of English,” she had told me. “Only Afrikaans. And she never leaves the farm. She’s only been to Cape Town a few times in her life. They think I’m so odd to be here. I’m ‘the grape girl’!”

Orange groves, mile after mile of their dense boughs and deep green leaves, covered the sunny valleys of Citrusdal. If I’d been in my own car, I would have stopped and stayed the night in this pretty town, among the fragrant trees, at the edge of the Cedarberg Wilderness, so beautiful that my Afrikaner writer friend the late Etienne Leroux, author of Seven Days at the Silbersteins and other novels, chose this wilderness as his burial place. It was easy enough to get to, only two or three hours from Cape Town, but for all its proximity a great empty landscape that had once belonged to the San people, who had left their vivid cave paintings behind.

The road was perfectly smooth, looping around the hills, just two lanes of it, the main thoroughfare headed up the left side of Africa. To keep order — and order was the priority — it had been essential for the old white-dominated South African government to create a world-class road system: the army needed it to move with speed and efficiency, to control the population and to fight the long and bloody insurgency in the territory of South-West Africa and beyond. This highway built for jeeps and troop trucks, as well as for moving produce in the bad times, was now a road for sightseers and travelers to Namibia.

In the window seat just ahead of Hansie, an older woman sat reading an article in Weslander, an Afrikaans newspaper, with the headline “Hoërskool Brand!” showing a photo of a school in flames. Squat and plump, with a shelving belly and short white hair, she had the Roman emperor look of Gertrude Stein. On her wide lap she had a brown bag of sandwiches, which she ate as she read the paper, looking content.

We had by now passed the larger groves of fruit trees and the wine farms, and the land looked as though all the topsoil had been blasted from it, leaving only low scrub, prickly bush, and bare rock. But even in this seemingly unpromising place to farm I saw irrigated valleys of grapes and citrus. This was at Clanwilliam and Vanrhynsdorp, the place names suggesting the different nationalities of those who had settled here.

Dorp was the right designation for the roadside settlements, the blunt and slightly comical Afrikaans word meaning “village” or “small town.” We pulled in at one, another pit stop at the edge of the much drier veldt, where there were no farms at all, the rubbly semidesert looking like New Mexico or Arizona.

I struck up a conversation with a woman here, in her early thirties perhaps, simply to ask why she was taking the bus and how far she was going. It turned out she was going all the way to Namibia too. Her name was Anke, and she was of mixed race, perhaps part German, part African or Malay.

“I’m visiting my grandparents in Windhoek,” she said, “just for a break. I need a break.”

She lived in Cape Town and had a business there, making children’s furniture, and though business had been slow, she said it was picking up.

“Why are you taking the bus?” I asked.

“I always take the bus. I wouldn’t dream of going any other way.” She had the fluttery Afrikaans way of making the word “dream” into a stammer of two syllables, as if whispering ecstasies. “I love looking at the hills and the farms. It’s nice and relaxing on the bus.”

I agreed, and this rolling road was the only way of seeing how one country slid slowly into another.

Anke had been cheerful, yet in the next couple of hours a great sunlit sadness descended as the land flattened, the trees vanished, the mountains slipped down, and all the miles to the horizon filled with only reddened grass and low blue tufts of bush. The sheer size of the landscape was daunting, its dryness like desert, and some of the soil held the hard glitter of salt. Nothing grew higher than ten inches or so.

In Cape Town, my bedside reading had been Voices, a memoir by Frederic Prokosch, a somewhat forgotten American writer of the middle decades of the twentieth century who had spent much of his life as an expatriate in Europe. His novel The Asiatics had been a bestseller in 1935 because it seemed such an elegant and accurate depiction of a young man’s travels through China and India. But the travel in it, so evocative and convincing, had all been invented — Prokosch had hardly stirred from his home in New Haven when he wrote the book, and his later life was marked by a succession of hoaxes. The Asiatics was much admired by the traveler Bruce Chatwin, who habitually fictionalized his travel writings, punching up mild episodes and giving them drama, turning a few days in a place into a long and knowledgeable residence. Prokosch’s many encounters with great writers in Voices also seemed like hoaxes, and the world-weariness itself was an affectation.

“Yes, there are still those endless jungles and deserts down in Africa,” a European socialite tells the author. “But what do we care about Africa? Nothing that matters happens in Africa.”

This was still the ignorant opinion of many people in Europe and the United States. I had copied it into my notebook and given Voices away, but I was reminded of “nothing happens” in this long stretch of emptiness that was taking us up the winding, narrow road to Springbok.

We were in the Namaqualand interior, in a stony immensity of low hills and gullies, a desolate grandeur I associated with dinosaur bones. The patches of white I took to be rocks were sheep, in the far distance as small, immobile, round, and mute as stones.

I was thinking — and wrote this in the notebook that bounced on my knee — how I often questioned what I was doing when I happened to be so far away in a parched climate like this. Way past retirement age and alone, I rode among bald hills and scrub, headed to Namibia. If it seemed purely self-indulgent to be here, what perverse aspect of my personality was I indulging?

I argued myself into thinking that physical experience is the only true reality. I didn’t want to be told about this, nor did I wish to read about this at second hand. I didn’t want to look at pictures or study it on a small computer screen. I didn’t want to be lectured about it. I wanted to be traveling in the middle of it, and for it to be washing over me, as it was today, in the emphatic weather, very hot, the glissades of light and heat that gave it a visible lifelessness — now very bright, and all the vitality burned away.

Under the aqueous, utterly cloudless, late afternoon sky and the setting sun lay a landscape of broken and piled-up stones, tortured into sharp valleys and flinty cliffs. The place looked ancient and as if no one had ever lived here, and it matched the profile of an old woman on the bus who stared at the African stones like Karen Blixen, and had the same iguana face.

Sundown at Springbok was an unexpected and eerie arrival at a twilit town surrounded by rock, with smallish, stucco-walled houses embedded in the slopes of a valley of broken granite. As a settlement it seemed an absurdity. What was the point of such a place, glowing in the middle of the descending darkness, not another town for miles?

The answer was that copper had been found near here, the first mineshafts sunk in the seventeenth century by the earliest Dutch settlers. Copper and zinc were still mined in the area, but Springbok was best known today for the profusion of wildflowers that appeared in August and September, the South African spring. The darker history was that of the massacre of the Nama people — the Namaqua — by the Germans who’d come south from Windhoek, heavily armed. The indigenous Nama had lived hereabouts since the dawn of humanity and had flourished because of their proximity to the Orange River. But the discovery of copper and diamonds by the Dutch, and farther north the German imperative to have a whole colony to itself, meant that the native population had to be dealt with mercilessly. In a war that took place between 1904 and 1907, most of the Nama and Herero people were exterminated and the rest driven away or enslaved.

This is the brutal sort of history that produces shock in the tourist, but since it has its parallels all over the Americas, where genocide and slavery were routine, it is sanctimonious to tut-tut. Anyone in Springbok could point out that the Wampanoag Indians captured in King Philip’s War by the embattled Pilgrim fathers were sent wholesale on ships and worked to death as slaves on Caribbean sugar plantations. The curious experience of African history is that it so often throws up images of one’s own country’s past. But in South Africa it is all so awful and so recent it is a happier diversion to concentrate on the wildflowers.

Half a dozen people on the bus got out at Springbok and, relieved to be home, reassured by their arrival, overcoming their shyness, called out “Safe travels!” to the rest of us.

Darkness fell. We had come almost four hundred miles and were near the border of Namibia. Later, in the glare of lights on tall poles, we pulled into a gas station, and while the other passengers scrambled for food — platters of fried potatoes served up by smiling women dressed like nurses in white smocks and white caps — I looked for someone to talk to. I found a man at the edge of the lights, which was the edge of the desert. He wore a wool hat and thicknesses of ragged clothes. He turned, surprised, because he happened to be shouting at his dog, a poor, beaten-looking mutt that seemed submissive and confused.

“Where are we?”

Instead of answering, the man shouted at me and walked away, his dog following.

“Steinkopf,” a bystander said.

Farther down the road, not long after that, we came to a high chainlink fence surmounted by razor wire and looking like the perimeter of a prison. Making it more prisonlike were watchtowers and dazzling lights and men in uniform with wicked rifles slung under their arms. The border.

Some people collect antiques or stamps or Beatles memorabilia. I collect border crossings, and the best of them are the ones where I’ve had to walk from Cambodia to Vietnam, from the United States to Mexico, from Pakistan to India, from Turkey to the Republic of Georgia. To me a frontier represents the life of most people. “I became a foreigner,” V. S. Pritchett said of being a traveler. “For myself that’s what a writer is — a man living on the other side of a frontier.” It’s a thrill to go on foot from one country to another, a mere pedestrian exchanging countries, treading the theoretical inked line that is shown on maps.

Often a frontier is a river — the Mekong, the Rio Grande, the Zambezi; or a mountain range — the Pyrenees, the Ruwenzoris; or a sudden alteration in topography, a bewildering landscape transformation — hilly Vermont flattening into Quebec. But just as often — perhaps most of the time — a border is irrational yet unremarkable, a seamlessness that goes by the name of No Man’s Land, a width of earth bounded by fences. You can hardly tell one country from the other. Often there is no visible difference, as any migrant who crosses the Sonoran Desert from Mexico to Arizona can testify — wasteland straddles the frontier; if there is any drama, it is imposed by the authorities, heightened by the presence of police or the Border Patrol. Otherwise, the border is a contrived and arbitrary dotted line, a political conceit dividing communities and people, creating difference and disharmony. I suppose the act of walking across a border is my way of undoing difference and seeking harmony, even if it is only in my head. It is nearly always a happy act, even in the darkness of night, slowed by officialdom and inspections.

There’s an equality in pedestrian border crossings, too: no first class, no fast lane, no preferential treatment. You line up at the office, get your passport stamped, your bags searched, and off you go, perhaps to find a ride on the other side or to reboard the bus. The bus doesn’t leave until everyone is processed, and while waiting the travelers shuffle their feet and become restlessly talkative.

My map gave this limit of South Africa as Vioolsdrift.

“Viool means ‘violin,’ ” a woman told me. We had gotten off the bus and were going through immigration. “It’s a funny name for a place.”

Drift means “ford,” as in fording a river. The Orange River was the border, but “violin”? One story had it that a Nama man, named Jan Viool after his fiddling, lived here and gave the place its pretty name.

The woman I was speaking to, one of the passengers, was elderly but uncomplaining, standing in the chilly night carrying a small bag. She had a complex ancestry: “I’m German and Malay and Herero, and some Khoisan, and others.”

Her name was Johanna, and she was going home to Windhoek. This was the best way, through the Northern Cape. “Beautiful countryside,” she said, “especially when there’s flowers.” She loved to travel, even on this old bus.

“I’ve been to Britain. It was nice. But my cousin lives in Croydon, a sort of suburb. I didn’t like it at all. Too many people. Not like this.” Johanna gestured to the emptiness, the surrounding darkness, the immensity of night sky, the glitter of stars. “I went to Malaysia once, just to see it.”

“Did people ask you where you came from?”

“Ach, yes. Some of them asked, ‘Are you an Australian aborigine?’ ” And she laughed. “I told them ‘Namibia,’ but they had no idea what I was talking about. They didn’t know this country. Never heard of it.”

Her friend Edith was with her, the woman I’d spotted who looked like a Roman emperor with her scraped-down Gertrude Stein hair. But now I could see that she had a distinct and rather handsome hue that marked her as mixed race. She was bound for Rehoboth, on the road to Windhoek.

“They say the most dreadful things about us,” Edith said. “They” I took to mean the world at large. “But you know, we have everything here, plenty of food and lots of space. I reckon we’re luckier than most people, but no one knows us, no one really gives a toss.”

“You’ve traveled the world too?”

“A bit. Enough to know that I don’t want to live anywhere else.” She regarded the night sky. “And it’s peaceful here now. Not like what it was. We had a war, you know. Shooting. Bombs.”

“It’s so much better now,” Johanna said.

“Except there’s no work for the young people,” Edith said, and turned because someone had shouted — the bus driver, calling to us. Edith shuffled toward the bus, muttering, “Mustn’t get left behind.”

The Namibian side was Noordoewer (“North Bank” in Afrikaans). Another stroll, more formalities, a new country. It was getting late, and when we set off on the bus again I slept, not waking until the stop in Keetmanshoop, where I saw Edith again, hugging herself against the chill.

“How are we doing?” I asked.

“Very well. Only five hundred kilometers to go.”

Johanna screeched. Edith laughed. Other passengers were yawning and stamping the fatigue out of their feet. No one minded the distance. Off we went into the darkness, deeper into Namibia, across the desert.

* For his hate speech and for “sowing divisions,” Julius Malema was removed from his Youth League post and expelled from the African National Congress in April 2012. Later that year he reemerged, using the killings by police of striking miners to position himself as a leader once again, with his stated theme: “The government has turned against its people.”