Shorelines (28 page)

“Jeffreys Bay becomes the centre of the surfing universe for more than two weeks,” she said. “Every event is streamed live on the Billabong website, and there is massive media coverage, publicity you could never buy.”

Another feature of Cheron’s company was that she preferred to employ surfers.

“Everyone buys into the lifestyle,” she said. “Surfers run the business the way we want it. Outsiders just don’t get it – there’s a distinctive look.

“And in terms of our employment agreement, there’s ‘permission to surf when there’s surf’. After all, why are the kids here in Jeffreys in the first place? It’s the best right-handed break in the world.”

Carpark Vanessa emerged from her Wendy-house office as we returned. OK, I give up. Why Carpark Vanessa?

“Because I’ve been here working in the carpark for longer than anyone can remember,” she said. “We’ve got a few soul surfers in at 20 Pepper Street – Steve said to call you.”

The old guys (what am I saying? They were younger than me) were all successful businessmen and were tucking into a late English breakfast after a morning on the waves. We asked a large fellow what it was like being ‘in the green room’.

“Hmm. It’s a very rare feeling,” he said. “Like getting laid these days.” His feisty little wife raised her eyebrow as if to say that’s it, buster. No afternoon delights for you.

That night, Steve Walsh played for us. He sang the Waits classic ‘Heart of Saturday Night’ and I was back in old Jo’burg, drinking tequila sunrises on Rockey Street with my mates after a day of teargas in the townships. And then he put down his Fender, picked up his sushi knife, and proceeded to feed us …

After writing my final exams at Grahamstown’s Rhodes University, I shoulder my rucksack and stick a thumb out on the road to Jo’burg, via King William’s Town. Three black guys in a
skoroskoro
stop for me and I jump on the back, taking shelter from the pounding Border storm under a torn piece of old tarpaulin. This is 1975 and I’m not sure I’ve done the right thing here.

Especially when they stop off at a busy shebeen in King William’s Town and load up with sweet wine and Carling Black Label beer.

“Celebration drinks for after they’ve sorted me out,” I worry to myself.

They potter on into the countryside of thickets and low hills, and come to a stop in the middle of nowhere. Uh oh. This is it.

The driver’s mate hops out and hands me my very own bottle of sweet wine.

“It will keep you dry,” he laughs. Yeah, right. You just want to get me drunk and then it’s all over. But this line of thought is starting to tire me. They drive on, while I get a bit pissed at the back, singing Neil Young softly to myself in the rain. Let me exit this world with a suitable rendition of ‘Only Love Can Break Your Heart’. Kind regards, Mugged & Maudlin, Eastern Cape.

Just south of Cathcart, my benefactors stop again and go searching for wood to burn. Is this my final resting place? No. A piece of boerewors sausage the length of a champion python is flung onto burning bush. The lightly toasted meat is divided into quarters and I am handed my share.

There is a minimum of conversation. No life stories are exchanged. All I know is that they’re three Pondos going to look for work on a farm up in the Stormberg, somewhere near Molteno.

The men leave me on the N6 to Aliwal North, half-cut, well fed and bemused. Fear had driven me just this side of mad. The uncomplicated kindness of a lift, a bottle of sweet wine and a piece of sausage brings me back.

“OK Jules, let’s go out and commit some serious responsible tourism,” I joked to my wife 28 years later as I packed camera gear for a spin around Port Elizabeth’s townships with Calabash Tours. Finally, we were back in the Eastern Cape.

Responsible tourism. What a fuddy-duddy name for a great thing. A fun thing. Rather ‘dance-in-the-street tourism’. Rather ‘win-win tourism’.

“Maybe they should call it ‘discovery tourism’,” mused Jules as we left our boutique hotel in the Summerstrand with one Nelson Sebezela from Calabash. On the way, we picked up an aspiring wine maker from Australia, a hulking youngster called Michael. He was already looking green about the gills, muttering something about a late-night curry that was shouting the odds back at him.

“And you haven’t even seen your first Smiley yet,” said Nelson.

“What’s a Smiley?” asked Michael with an uncertain look.

“Wait. That’s for later.”

I wanted a photograph of Queen Victoria, who stood stern and forbidding outside the Port Elizabeth Library. She was a silent reprimand to overdue-book borrowers everywhere.

As I was framing her glaring visage in my lens, two local lasses called out:

“Leave that old lady. Take our picture instead.” I made them pose with The Librarian Queen as a compromise.

From the minute we climbed into the Calabash-mobile, it was clear who our guide’s hero was.

“Nelson! Rolihlahla! Mandela!” he cheered, fist clenched and waving out of the minibus window. Nelson Sebezela then launched into
Xhosa for Dummies & Daytrippers
with an exhibition of confounding vocal clicks.

Driving into the middle-class township of KwaGxaki, Nelson spoke of goats and street committees:

“Around here, when you move into a new area, it’s traditional to have a big party, invite all your neighbours and slaughter a goat. They’ll quiz you about where you’ve come from, what you do, who your family is and what made you give up your last place.

“I recently left my parents in KwaZakhele,” he said. “I found my own spot, in the same township, and my new neighbours were so curious they sent a delegation to the family home to find out more about me.

“Even in the richer townships, there are street committees. That’s us Africans – we’re always in each other’s business. Sometimes, however, those street committees play a vital role, like breaking up family feuds.”

Three ghosts, magnificently covered in white clay, strode across a gully in the distance. I wanted to photograph them but because they were
abaKwetha
(initiates) no verbal contact was allowed. So, after a hundred hand gestures, they finally agreed to pose in silence.

We passed through the morning markets of KwaZakhele, where women vendors were cooking up a roadside storm. Among the “Chickens, Plucked or Live” signs was far stranger fare.

“Welcome to Smiley Street,” said Nelson. There came an audible groan from the sick Aussie at the back as we encountered scores of blackened sheep’s heads – the local breakfast of champions.

“The sheep’s head is put into the fire,” Nelson informed us, thoroughly enjoying this part of the tour. “When the lips have been stretched into a smile, you know it’s done. The women then take it out of the fire, clean it up and remove the brains, which we rarely eat. The real treats are the cheeks and the gums.”

Just then, somewhere in the vicinity of historic Red Location, Michael had to exit the minibus and chunter loudly in the mud.

“
Sies, man!”
a couple of passing township women remarked, and turned their heads away in disgust.

Three years later, on the great
Shorelines
tour, we were back in the townships of Port Elizabeth with Nelson. This time, his boss, Paul Mediema of Calabash, was with us. We were drinking beer down at Kwekwe’s in KwaZakhele Township.

Was our kombi safe around the corner, I asked. “If the kombi is stolen, we just report the matter to the
amaDhlozi
,” said Paul, rolling himself a cigarette rather expertly. “It’s a system that evolved out of the anti-apartheid movement. Self-defence units became street committees. If you lose something, you just go to them, pay a finder’s fee and that’s that.”

In the kitchen at Kwekwe’s, Patricia January and her assistant Beauty Dywili were adding final touches to the tourists’ feast of chicken stew, boerewors, coleslaw, mealie pap, mash and fresh bread. They were expecting a large busload of Hollanders.

“We can’t give them too much traditional food,” Patricia said. “It would stress them.” There would be no grinning sheep on offer tonight.

The regulars, mostly older men, were having their Friday-night drink and catching up with mates.

The huge luxury bus arrived and out streamed about 40 bewildered souls. The township choir, a ragtag band of singing angels, began a litany of praise and welcome. The Hollanders walked the gauntlet of warmth and song into the shebeen, studiously avoiding eye contact. Soon, a few cold beers, some excellent singing and Patricia’s hot meal relaxed the group and grins began to emerge like shy little face-ferrets. Some very responsible tourism was on the go …

The next day we drove north towards Port Alfred. It was raining and the land about us looked Irish. The firestorms of the past week were nearly forgotten, as though they had happened in another country 10 years before. Still, we phoned Ashley back at Storms River to find out if all was well.

“The rain arrived,” he said, and you could hear the party in his voice. “The fires died just in time and missed the village.” We said goodbye as we entered what looked like the set of
The Truman Show
.

The morning sun lit up the Port Alfred marina in a dozen pastel hues. Fluffy clouds drifted overhead. Canvas-covered boats bobbed gently on blue water and the air was still.

We were in Port Alfred’s pre-Christmas lull, guests of the founder and developer of the Royal Alfred Marina, Justin de Wet Steyn. Within weeks, most of the 200 mansions that made up this slice of seaside heaven would come alive with upcountry families. Endless rows of Christmas lights would shine into the skies of settler country and Santa would ride the canals in a ski boat laden with presents. Canoes would forage up the Kowie River; deep-sea fishing boats would head out into the Indian Ocean for bigger stuff. And no Smileys would be served here, either.

“This is the lifestyle people dream about,” said the developer, who had made his earlier fortune from fried-chicken franchises all over southern Africa.

“Me, not so much,” I confided to my wife as we detoured inland. “I’d prefer something in a shabby little Mozambican beach bar one day.”

The bar we were headed to was the Pig ’n Whistle in Bathurst, a settler village with a history of frontier wars and house-to-house battles with the “rampant Xhosa”. On our travels I had found a very strange book called
Camp Life & Sport in South Africa
by one TJ Lucas, who had been a Grahamstownbased hussar in the early 1850s.

Lieutenant Lucas had a rough time of it at first. Pranksters sold him a vicious horse that ran him straight into a stone wall at high speed, causing half his flowering moustache to shear clean off. Then a new commanding officer, named, for reasons of propriety, “Colonel S”, arrived. The little colonel particularly hated wearing his hussar’s shako, a kettle-shaped helmet fancied at the time. After various parades, he could be spotted kicking the poor shako about his office floor with gusto.

Colonel S once took them out on patrol, and they were beset by a huge swarm of locusts. One of the locusts flew directly into the colonel’s eye, distressing him greatly.

“I’ll serve you out for that, you little beast,” the colonel shouted, snatching the locust up in his fingers and turning around to his troops. “Now who has a pin for me?”

Someone produced a pin and the colonel shortly had the offending locust skewered.

“You’ll hit me in the eye, will you, will you?” he yelled at the writhing locust while giving the pin “a vicious twirl”. Both locust and pin were then placed in one of his saddlebags and they rode on, into the scrub. But whenever his eye pained him, the colonel would have the little locust withdrawn and “subject to fresh torments at the hands of its remorseless captor”.

Like the frontier wars that took place between Xhosa and colonial, the book has its deadly-serious side. We were to find out more about that later, but our next item of business lay in the Buffalo City itself: East London.

We stayed overnight with Lew Elias, a senior journalist from the
Daily Dispatch
newspaper. Joining us was a mutual friend, the photographer Les Bush, who had grown up in East London with Lewis. With Lew and Les as our guides, we travelled around the city where the late Janis Joplin would have felt at home. Everyone, it seemed, owned a brand-new Mercedes-Benz.

Daimler-Chrysler practically owned the town. Staff had great incentives to buy themselves C-Class Mercedes coupés.

“So you’d get spray painters and the like driving to work in these very expensive cars,” said Lew. “Any stranger to East London would think there was some serious money here somewhere.”

We went for breakfast to a great spot on Latimer’s Landing. Opposite us stood rows and rows of different models of Mercedes.

“There’s more than R46 million in cars watching us have breakfast,” said Lew, who, one suspects, was a bit of a petrol head.

While we waited for our food, I read from an advertising leaflet fixed to the middle of the table:

“Private Investigations. Confidentiality Guaranteed. Spymaster