Holidays in Hell: In Which Our Intrepid Reporter Travels to the World's Worst Places and Asks, "What's Funny About This" (29 page)

It's always hard to see hope with a hangover, nowhere more so
than at the butt-end of this continent in a country that's like a
nightmare laundry-detergent commercial-makes whites whiter,
coloreds brighter. They're building themselves a gigantic Cinerama, Technicolor Ulster here. And the troubles in Ireland have
been going on since my own relative Tighernan O'Rourke, prince of
Breffni, had his wife stolen by Diarmuid MacMurrough, king of
Leinster, and O'Rourke got so mad that MacMurrough had to call
on Henry II of England for help. That was in 1152. 1 think we can
expect the same swift and decisive resolution to the problem in
South Africa.

Divestment and sanctions-I guess those are the big answers
proposed in the States. Well, economic sanctions sure nipped the
Russian Revolution in the bud, made the Ayatollah Khomeini's
Iran fold like a hideaway bed and put Chiang Kai-shek right back
in power on the mainland.

The whole time I was in South Africa I only talked to one
person who was in favor of sanctions and that was the divinity
student in Transkei who'd visited the South Side of Chicago. He
cited biblical example ("When the Pharaoh hardened his heart, God had to find another way"), but he also told me the Bible
requires polygamy. So I'm not sure whether he was in earth orbit or
not. Of course, there were a lot of people I didn't talk to. The
comrades, busy performing "the necklace"-that is, putting flaming car tires around people's necks (actually, down over their
shoulders in order to pin their arms to their sides)--were hard to
chat up. And I never bumped into Bishop Tutu. Most of the blacks I
did talk to would be considered, by South African standards,
middle class, even sellouts-Uncle Bantus. They told me "political power grows from economic power." They saw sanctions as
hurting one of the few black chances to get a leg up the ladder.

I have no idea whether they were right or wrong. But when I
was in Ulundi, the administrative capital of the Zulu tribal lands, I
was hanging around, drinking beer and talking to people, and a
young political organizer leaned over to me and said, "It's really
very simple why we are against sanctions. If we have money, we can
buy guns." So maybe we should factor that into our next U.S. -Outof-South-Africa rally.

The South African government's own solution, the homelands,
is a hideous joke. I traveled through the Tswana tribal homeland,
Bophuthatswana, in the north; KwaZulu in Natal where the Zulus
refuse to accede to "independence"; and through the two Xhosa
homelands, Transkei and Ciskei along the Indian Ocean. They're
all the same. Everyplace is littered with windowless huts that you
couldn't tell from latrines if there were any latrines to tell them
from. The garden plots look like Grateful Dead fan beards. People
are dumped into these rural wastes, far more people than the land
can support. So the men have no choice but to go off to the rest of
South Africa and work as "foreigners." The homelands are on the
worst land in the country, scorched foothills and prairies on the
verge of desertification. Raw trenches of the red African soil have
eroded in webs across the pastures. Every foot of ground is overgrazed.

The tribal economic system, like that of ancient Europe, is
based on cattle. (The word "pecuniary" comes from the Latin,
pecus, "cattle.") The cows aren't often eaten or sold or even milked.
They are the bank account, the measure of the clan's and the
family's wealth. They're also an ecological nightmare in these
cramped precincts.

I used to have eight head of Hereford beef cattle at my place
back in the States. I asked some people in Ulundi what kind of wife
these would get me.

"Oh," said one, "probably a girl who's lived in the city for a
while and had a couple of kids."

"But," I said, "these are pure-bred Polled Herefords, going a
thousand pounds or more."

"No, no, it's like Rand notes, it's the number of cows that
counts."

I did see one homeland that worked, beautiful and severe
bushveldt taken back from Boer farms and restored to its natural
state with blesbok and gemsbok and springbok boking around all
antlered and everything and herds of zebra-art deco on the
hoof-and packs or gaggles or whatever-they're-called of giraffes
(an NBA of giraffes would be the right term). This was, however, a
homeland for the animals, the Botsalano Game Park in
Bophuthatswana.

Tom Mills and I were riding in a Land Rover with his wife and
two kids when we came right up beside five rhinoceri-four really
enormous gigantic ones and a calf that was pretty tremendously
huge itself. It's not easy to describe the effect that the first sight of a
wild rhino has on a not very brave author from Ohio. It's like taking
your four-year-old on a surprise visit to the Mesozoic era. I felt a
vaulting thrill combined with some desire to start crying and crawl
under the jeep. Tom, in what I felt was an extremely foolhardy
move, turned off the engine.

"There are two kinds of rhinos," said Tom. "White rhinos are
fairly docile. They don't usually bother you. But black rhinos are
very nervous and aggressive. They'll charge."

""These rhinos are gray," I said.

"White rhinos and black rhinos are actually about the same
color," said Tom.

"How do you tell them apart?"

"White rhinos have a square upper lip. The black rhino's is
pointy."

I looked at our rhinos. Their upper lips were square, in a
pointy sort of way. "How else do you tell them apart?"

"I forget."

The rhinos, who are very nearsighted, finally noticed us. They cocked their heads in this Godzilla way they have and began to
amble in our direction. A rhinoceros ambles at about 60 mph.
There was a moment of brief-but nonetheless high-drama while
the Land Rover engine went ugga-ugga-ugga before it caught.

The rhinos made South Africa more depressing, if that's
possible. The big game is disappearing from Africa. Most Africans
have never seen a rhino in its natural state (which is a state of mild
pique, I believe) any more than we've seen the prairie black with
bison. And, to be fair, the white South Africans are the only people
on the continent returning any land to the wild. Whatever's going to
happen in South Africa will be bad for the rhino, too. And rhinos
only occasionally kill for fun and never go to the U. N. afterward
and say they did it because of American imperialism or communist
subversion.

We drank as much as usual that night, sitting outside the tents
with Botsalano's game warden. While baboons goofed off in the
shrubbery and frogs sounded in the water hole like ten thousand
little boys with sticks on an endless picket fence, Tom's wife Sally
talked about her father, an Edinburgh grocer who'd come out to
South Africa when she was a little girl. "He was looking for a
healthier place to raise a family, where my sisters and I could grow
up with more of a future than we'd have in Scotland."

The game warden told how the leopard was coming to extinction in South Africa. The leopards used to be hunted as trophies,
mostly by Americans and Englishmen. Any farmer who had a
leopard shot on his land received a trophy fee of several hundred
Rand. So whenever a farmer had a leopard around, he was careful
to preserve it until some rich guy came looking to decorate the
rumpus room. Even if this cost the farmer a few lambs or calves, it
was worth it. Then the animal rights people, the "bunny-huggers'
as the warden called them, got legislation passed forbidding the
import of all spotted fur, including stuffed heads, into the U.S. and
the U. K. Now the farmers just shoot the leopards-mothers, cubs
and everything-as pests. "So fucking bloody much for good intentions," said the warden.

A couple days later, driving with Tom in his Mercedes sedan
through the perfectly empty Sunday streets of Jo-burg, I put it to
him about South Africa. "There aren't that many Afrikaners. What, three million vs. two million English and other real Europeans?
And you guys control the economy, almost all the major industries,
right?"

"Mostly, yes."

"You've got the money. You've got forty percent of the white
vote. And you've got twenty-four million blacks, coloreds and
Indians who'd back you up. What's keeping you from taking the
Afrikaner National Party and snapping its spine like a chopstick?"

"That's just not how the English are, you know," said Tom.
"Most of us aren't very political."

"A couple of Chicago ward bosses and you'd have this country
in your pocket."

"I suppose people think it wouldn't be cricket."

I'd never heard "wouldn't be cricket" used seriously before.
Interesting what "cricket" means if you think about it-boring,
insanely complicated and riddled with snobbery and class.

We'd pulled onto the N-3 freeway. Jo-burg's office towers
shone behind us. Flat-topped artificial hills from the gold mine tips
rose in the distance. I was staring out the window at South Africa's
admirable highway beautification when we came over a rise, and I
caught a glimpse of what was beyond the screen of trees and
shrubs.

Thousands of tiny, slatternly huts were pressed together in a
jumble stretching for miles. And every one of those hovels seemed
to be on fire. Smoke drifted in an ominous smudge across the
highway. "Riots!" I thought, trying to fasten my seat belt for the
high-speed evasive driving we'd have to do through hordes of angry
comrades who would, no doubt, come roiling across the freeway at
any moment, stones and firebombs in hand.

"If you look over there," said Tom, "you can see Alexandra.
It's one of our older black townships."

Maybe he hadn't noticed it was on fire. "Isn't it on fire or
something?" I said.

"That's from the cookstoves. They don't have electricity."

And then Alexandra slipped back behind the decorative landscaping and was gone.

Tom and I had been out that afternoon shooting doves again
with Connie the Greek car dealer. We were shooting near Sharp ville, site of the famous 1960 massacre, a sleepy farm town,
nobody's picture of a killing ground. All around were huge Afrikaner grain spreads, completely up-to-date and identical to big
mechanized American farms except they weren't going bankruptthanks, in part, to worldwide bans on selling grain to South Africa.
But out in the middle of these homesteads, invisible from the pretty
country roads, are the people who work the land. Their one-room,
cinderblock, tin-roofed shacks are set in the fields with wheat
growing right up to the doors-not even room for a garden, just a
communal well in a muddy dooryard. There were half-naked kids
all over the place. We took some of the kids along to run after the
dead birds and pluck and gut them-"curly-headed retrievers,"
the South Africans say. The kids got a Rand apiece, about fifty
cents, U.S., plus cigarettes. One of the boys, who said he was
fifteen but looked an undersized twelve, was fascinated by Tom's
Mercedes. He'd never been in a car before. Tom and I gave him a
ride up and down the dirt track by his home. The boy kept sniffing
and poking at the air conditioner vents. "Where does the cold air all
come from?" he asked.

"Um . . ." said Tom and looked at me.

"God, I don't know," I said. "Something gets heated and that,
uh, makes it cold." So much for the educational benefits of superior civilization. Tom flicked the electric sun-roof switch to change
the subject.

The kid watched the roof panel slide back and forth. "Now
I've seen everything," he said.

Tom had a client named Gilead, a man of sixty or seventy
who'd started out selling coal from a sack in the black townships
and was now one of the richest men in Soweto. Save for a bit of
melanin, Gilly was the image of my Irish grandfather-closecropped hair, a build like a Maytag's and fingers thick as my wrists.
He even had the same gestures as my grandfather, pulling on the
old-fashioned pointy lapels of his banker's stripe suit, then planting his thumbs in the pockets of his vest and toying with the thick
watch chain that ran across his belly. Gilly's skull bore four or five
large hatchet scars from the gang quarrels of his youth. When I first
met him, in Tom's office, he was telling about one of the stores he
owns being "off-loaded" by the comrades.

"The gangs, they set up at either end of the street, you know.
They are just boys, some no more than ten years old. Some of the
boys come into your store and buy a pop. Then they throw the
bottles around to create their diversion and begin to empty the
shelves. And you just stay quiet if you don't want to be necklaced."

"Yes, but you weren't in the store when that happened," said
Tom.

Gilly began to laugh. "No, I was not in there the first two times
it happened."

"Well, he was in there the third time," said Tom to me, "and
he chased them down the street with his pistol."

"Oh, ho-ho-ho-ho," Gilly laughed and rocked back in his
chair as though the comrades were the best joke in the world.
"When I was young, ho-ho-ho-ho, there were guns everywhere in
the townships. And these little fellows, all they've got are stones."

"You know what we have to do," said Tom when Gilly'd left,
"we have to get Gilly to come out to our house for dinner and bring
his wife and some of his friends. It would be interesting for you to
talk to them."

But the riots in Soweto kept anyone from getting in or out after
dark and, even in the daytime, there were too many barricades and
stonings to bring the women along. So Gilly and three of his black
friends, young men in their twenties, came to an afternoon braai, a
barbecue, at Tom and Sally's house. A Christmas-week strike had
begun in Soweto that day and Gilly, Bob, Carswell and Nick arrived
in a rusted Datsun, although Gilly owns a BMW.

We all sat on the patio for a stiff twenty minutes while the
Millss maid peeked around the doorpost with an expression of
intrigued disapproval. But then a few beers were had and the
steaks and the boerewors sausages began to spatter on the grill, and
one more of the hundred thousand endless discussions of South
Africa's "situation" began.