Shorelines (31 page)

“On a clear day, you can see Perth and all the South African doctors and dentists. What’s that sound? Can you hear them crying to come back?”

We asked Peter about Wild Coast tourism and community involvement. All the hotels, it seemed, were white-owned, but were situated on tribal ground. It appeared that the European Union had invested more than R80 million in various projects to encourage local part-ownership, the refurbishing of the properties and development of various tourism assets. There had been successes and there had been failures. But no one was giving up yet. Folks around here had seen whites arriving over the past few centuries in the guise of traders, missionaries, colonists and soldiers. All tried to sell them some concept that usually ended up with Xhosas being shafted. There was deep history. And long memory.

If tourism failed up here, then mining would win. It was that simple. A northern stretch of the Wild Coast was particularly rich in ilmenite and a massive Australian prospecting company was waiting in the wings. Pitting the long-term benefits of tourism against the short-term profits of mining is like putting a duck into a dog-fight. Even before the first round is announced, you know who’s going to win, right? Well, maybe.

The only victorious duck we’d ever heard of was up in St Lucia, the home of yet more ilmenite. Maybe there
was
hope.

Our next tour of Coffee Bay was with 19-year-old Joseph Vulindlela of the Bomvana tribe. This tribe was famous for being one of the few along the coast to welcome and feed the survivors of the
Grosvenor
in the late 18
^th
century.

“And if I am found to be suitable, I will be a chief one day,” Joseph said calmly. Such a teenager.

We walked to a hilltop village called Rhini. Children and chickens ran rings around the huts. Did they grow mealies?

“Big time. We’re just starting to plough now that the rains have come.”

Joseph, who was just a year away from completing his schooling, still had to go through his manhood rites. Was he looking forward to the ritual?

“Big time. Well, a bit. I think there will be pain.”

His father had been a gold miner, but Joseph said his own future lay in tourism. We spoke about football.

“I am an Orlando Pirates supporter,” he said. “Whenever there’s a match, we walk up the road to a man who has a television set in his hut.”

Why was there a tyre on the apex of every hut, encrusted with broken glass?

“That’s to keep the owls away. Owls bring bad luck, bad spirits. Witchdoctors send them.”

There were so many questions we wanted to put to Joseph, and he seemed nonchalantly happy to answer them all honestly. Why, we asked, pointing at a wooden sled-wagon in a kraal nearby, were they not using wheels?

“That’s because when a wagon with wheels comes down a steep hill, it can roll into the oxen pulling it,” he said. “This can’t happen with a sled.”

Did he surf, we wanted to know.

“I tried it once and I fell off the board,” he laughed. “I stopped surfing. But I did teach myself to swim in the river.”

Joseph took us to the local shebeen. I peered inside, my eyes squinting into the sudden darkness, where half-a-dozen dead-eyed people sat clutching their traditional iJuba beer. Even I (not famous for being picky about my drinking spots) would not venture into that little hellhole.

We asked him about crime.

“There is crime in Coffee Bay, but it is mostly without guns. Just things stolen from houses at night. Sometimes from tourists on the beach.

“In December, people come from inland to rob the tourists; they wave knives in their faces to frighten them,” he said in a matter-of-fact manner. We may as well have been asking about fruit picking. And did they grow dagga around here?

“Oh, big time,” he laughed.

We packed and said our goodbyes.

“Cheerio, then,” said Peter Challis. “Just lay off our potholes and our pigs.”

That afternoon we hid out in a rather beautiful chalet at the Umngazi River Bungalows near Port St Johns. A biblical storm broke, fierce gusts of wind beat at the mock bananas, squalls dumped rain buckets and the electricity supply became erratic. No matter. We were safe with an interesting chunk of Gorgonzola, a bottle of good red and a pack of cards. In fact, for a few hours, we were the Untouchables. Such is the power of truly stinky cheese.

We spent two full days at this fine old resort, which was ‘family holiday’ in its true form. Every morning, teams of jovial nannies would arrive and take the kids off the parents’ hands for the day. By now we’d realised that the backbone of Wild Coast-hotel tourism came in the form of the classic Transkei nanny and her good nature.

The local river ranger and guide, Vincent Mtambeki, took us to meet some of the villagers in the area. We drove to Sicambeni, which also lay on the top of a hill overlooking the river. We stopped at a homestead and met two sisters, each of whom had a baby girl.

Nolukhanyiso Jim, 18, and her 24-year-old sister, Thabisa, lived together in a hut. As rural huts go, this one was well appointed: four beds, dressing table, cupboard, radio and light bulb running off a pre-paid electricity system and linoleum on the cowdung floor.

The fathers?

“They’re not around,” said Thabisa out of the corner of her mouth, because her daughter Athini was poking around in the other corner.

How did they live?

“Social grants for having the babies.”

Vincent, who was translating, indicated that it would be impolite to ask if they had had the babies specifically for the government money. We asked them what they did for fun. Did they ever visit Port St Johns?

“Not so much. We listen to the radio.”

As usual, we grilled our guide about the crime along the Wild Coast. We had to get this information from the ground.

“Those working on the coast are not the ones committing the crimes,” he said. “They get their work from tourism. It’s the people from inland. That’s why we keep a very close eye on the outsiders. The headmen are now stepping in and identifying the criminals.”

Armed with this good news we drove into one of my all-time favourite villages, Port St Johns. I wanted to break the law a little bit in the interests of good research. We made a weak, bourgeois effort to score some famous Pondo Poison. But we were too low on the Cool Scale and the locals laughed at us …

The summer of ’79 finds me in Port St Johns for the first time in my life. It’s a press junket to celebrate the launch of Capital Radio, the rebel rock station broadcasting from the Transkei bantustan into the old South Africa. The Capital Radio studio is installed in The White House, a hilltop mansion overlooking the port.

Very exciting, this. In the oppressively boring era that is Grey Shoes Apartheid SA, we cling onto anything new and challenging. An East Rand stripper bares all on stage and dances with a python. Bootleg copies of
Last Tango in Paris
do the rounds. The banned words of jailed poet Breyten Breytenbach are read to small groups late at night. And here’s a brave little radio station that is going to send us, at last, unfiltered news and music. Broadcasting from a town that has always been frontier chic, designed for vagabonds, traders and drifters. And for me, I think, usually when I’ve had too much to drink.

As we troop into The White House, two of the engineers cull me out of the media group.

“Have you ever tried Lusikisiki Lightning?”

“What’s that?”

“Come with us.”

Goodnight Irene. I smoke from the bong of mystery. The fine Pondo tetrahydrocannabinol and its 60 cannabinoid cohorts jump onto some friendly receptor molecules and ride my Neuron Highway down to Synapse Junction where they calm my fevered brain, offer some cosmic insights and give me the utter munchies.

“You’ve been very quiet this weekend,” says my old friend Gwen Gill, the
Sunday Times
columnist.

“Yes I have,” I reply, peering down through a puffy peppermint cloud as I float past the hotel reception. “What’s for supper?”

Port St Johns had, over the decades, developed a devilish reputation that was bringing backpackers in by the thousands. They came for the hiking and the beaches, of course. It had nothing to do with the fact that Pondo Poison (or Lusikisiki Lightning) was the best dope in the world. The South African marijuana industry was worth in excess of US$1 billion, and Port St Johns had a fair chunk of it.

Over the years, some rather funky economists backed the suggested decriminalisation of dagga. It would add a pile of cash to the GDP of South Africa. One could ‘sin tax’ it in the same way one did booze and cigarettes and possibly buy a whole bunch more submarines and snazzy jets. Which was still a sore point among taxpayers.

These same economists stated that currently the growers received very little for their crops, most of the profits going to the iniquitous ‘middle man’. But if it were legalised and controlled, it could be the saving of the rural population. Which is what they were saying about the poor coca farmers in South America as well.

Nearly a quarter of a century later, Jules and I met Ben Dekker, who looked like Robinson Crusoe’s love child. Ben, all two metres of him, had been part of my South African experience since I could remember. He’d been just about everything except a fireman and a cowboy in his life: politician, actor, lumberman, Masters student, demon surf lover, castaway and complete character. But I mostly remembered Ben as being a lovable refugee from The System we mere mortals were trapped in.

The first time we encountered him, Jules and I hid from Ben Dekker. Dressed in traditional headscarf, beaded waistcoat and leather flap over short-shorts that displayed, in Jules’ words, “a vast expanse of muscular thigh”, he strode past us on the porch of Lily’s Lodge at Second Beach like a gaudy ship in full sail. Maybe tomorrow, we said to each other, and lurked in the shadows.

We sat outside quaffing beer and cider, watching the circling frenzies of black bats. I went into the pub called Ben’s Bar to get more drinks. The legend turned to me and said:

“Take your lady and look at the full moon tonight.”

I did, and it was quite magnificent, that perfect orb of cratered blue cheese with its rainbow ring.

The next morning we ran into Ben on our way to town. He was dragging a piece of firewood. We formally introduced ourselves and made arrangements to meet later. At exactly five o’clock we arrived at his cave just off Second Beach. He was working on a sneezewood sculpture. He made some tom from finding the ‘inner shape’ in a piece of driftwood, settling it on a plinth and selling it as sea sculpture. I’d seen far worse in the northern-suburbs galleries of Jo’burg.

Ben was busy turning driftwood into the creatures of local myth and superstition: the snake, the one-legged lightning bird, the baboon (the witchdoctor’s familiar) that is ridden backwards and the strange three-legged tree hyrax.

He gave us each a goblet of Tassenberg Red and we discussed his latest river romp, which had landed him and one Loretta Toon in court on charges of public indecency. He smiled like the old rogue he really was.

“I was trying to save her from drowning.”

We continued our encounter at Lily’s over dinner. We had juicy filleted cob. Ben wandered in from the kitchen bearing a large plate loaded with
umngqusho
,
laced with calamari and crayfish sauce. We admired his magnificent beaded waistcoat. The hippie in me shoved my inner yuppie out of the way and really wanted one as well.

“Gail at Pondo People, a local craft shop, gives me a new waistcoat every year on my birthday,” he said.

“And what happens to the old one?”

“They go to a current lovely lady,” was all he’d say. How could the magistrate fine such a discreet gent R200 for public indecency? It didn’t seem right.

Jules asked him if he had a cellphone number, so we could occasionally contact him from Jo’burg.

“I had one once,” he said. “But I threw it into the sea and told the crayfish to phone when they were ready for me.”

That was all back in 2002. Now we were at his door (so to speak) again, on the
Shorelines
trip of 2005. But he wasn’t home. Instead, there was a note on the window of his shack that read:

“Sergeant Naidoo, I waited until 11.30. Now what?”

We drove back to Port St Johns to look for Ben. We didn’t have to go far. There, on the dirt road, was the incredibly tall, loping figure of Mr Dekker. We stopped, reintroduced ourselves and offered him a lift to town. He said he remembered us and was happy for the ride. Jules opened the back door of the Isuzu for him.

I thought he had climbed into the
bakkie
, so I drove off. Jules yelled at me to stop. He’d just started folding his massive frame into the small crawlspace (which is all the backseat of a 2003 Isuzu
bakkie
really amounts to) as I pulled off in first gear, nearly damaging the man seriously. I was very sorry. Ben was very gracious.

“Good grief,” I later gasped at Jules. “I nearly killed the icon of Port St Johns.”